10 Best Mission: Impossible Gadgets
Flute guns! Water clickers! Gloves! A rundown of the tech that made Tom Cruise action royalty.
Mission: Impossible follows the exploits of the Impossible Mission Force as they trot the globe, foiling one scenery-chewing bad guy after another. IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has faced a few home-grown baddies (Philip Seymour Hoffman's Owen Davian a particular highlight) as well as all of the super European villains you can shake an exploding stick at: Dougray Scott, Lea Seydoux and the 'big bad' of the series, Sean Harris, to name a few.
Adapted from the television show of the same name, the Mission: Impossible films have propelled Tom Cruise out of his pink shirt and white socks and into adrenaline-pumping action movie stardom.
Since Brian De Palma's iconic 1996 original, the series has gone larger with every entry and received a Fast & Furious style turnaround with Ghost Protocol (the fourth film in the franchise), which slid the focus away from international espionage and began to build the script around jaw-dropping action sequences, increasingly fuelled by Cruise's mid-life crisis lust for near-death experiences.
Whether it is HALO jump suits (a 25,000 feet jump which Cruise did 106 times, by the way), digital camouflage screens or pore-perfect masks, gadgets are the underpinning element of a series which, 24 years on, doesn't show any signs of slowing down.
Now, let's tear open a stick of mint and strawberry two-in-one gum and take a look at the 10 best Mission: Impossible gadgets and their many uses.
10. Contact Lens Camera
A key gadget from the series-changer Ghost Protocol, contact lens camera is a piece of tech that, with advent of smart glasses, seems almost within sight of reality.
The lens tracks faces via red and green squares and projects the information of each individual onto its surface for only the wearer to see, allowing rapid, real-time identification and tracking of suspects and sources.
In Ghost Protocol, IMF agent Trevor Hannaway (Josh Holloway) tracks his target via this facial recognition software in his micro-chipped contact lens, which links to both his phone and a digital database. As quick as the system is, it unfortunately doesn't prevent him from meeting an untimely end at the hands of Sabine Moreau (Lea Seydoux).