SAVE ME TOM CRUISE!

SAVE ME TOM CRUISE!

       Mission Impossible 3 stars Tom Cruise in the third installment of probably the movies he is most famous for performing miraculous stunts. The reason he gets so much praise for these movies is because he is actually the one doing the stunts. Of course some scenes have to be stunt doubles, but usually what you're seeing on screen is really him which is rare in Hollywood. 

Mission Impossible 3 is filled with many scenes that are spectacular and eye catching, but some of them seem to defy the laws of physics. The first scene which stood out to me is when Ethan Hunt(Cruise) has to receive the Rabbits foot in a heavily guarded building in Shanghai. His solution to getting in the building is to swing from a neighboring building to get on the roof. The taller building in which he is jumping from is 226m and the building he needs to get into is 162m which is explained in the previous scene. The gap between the building is 47.55m. The thing about the building he needs to get into is that it has an inclined roof which gives Ethan more room for error. The incline gives him about an extra 30m in which he can land on but still catch himself from falling off. So that means the lowest point he can land is about 132m. To me the question is whether or not his body can take that type of whiplash from falling off a building and being caught by a rope attached to his waste. Assuming he jumps off with a rope that is the right length I think it could be possible for his body to make it but for his internal organs to take that type of force is questionable. From the time he jumps off it takes about 15 seconds for the tension to catch up on the rope. Assuming he ways about what a normal human weighs the average time to hit terminal velocity is 12 seconds so that means he was going at about 120 mph(200 km/h). I do not believe he could have made it over without that injuring his spine or something.

The second part of this scene is when Ethan must then base jump off the top the same building after retrieving the rabbits foot. Jumping from 162m is already risky, but he isn't even able to jump from that height. He jumps out of a random window from an unknown height. I assume that he gets the rabbits foot and jumps from the same floor that it was on in order to get out the quickest. In the earlier scene its said that its on the 56th floor so lets say that's where he jumps from. An average story is about 3m tall which would be 168m so the measurements are already pretty inaccurate. The floors on this building could be shorter but you can infer it must be pretty close to the top for this to be remotely possible. It takes the chute about 10 seconds to open pretty much all the way until he crashes into a neighboring building into the window. When he realizes where he is at the wind catches his chute and pulls him back out to falling again. I believe the building definitely slowed his fall significantly. As he approached the ground his chute catches a street pole slowing his fall to a perfect halt before hitting the asphalt. Without these perfect circumstances of his fall I don't believe he would have landed safely without at least a couple of broken bones.

The last scene to really question physics is when he runs a record 1 minute and 30 second mile. That means if he were to be running a time trial on a track his average lap time would be 22 seconds which would add up to about 40mph(64kmh). I believe the fastest time ever ran by a human is 28mph and that was ran in a very burst of time. There is no physical way he could run 40mph for a mile straight. Of course this scene could be shortened for movie time sake, but it's not a perfect movie.

Generally most movies don't have these kind of impossible scenes, but that's what makes Mission Impossible movies enjoyable. For the most part I actually believe they make these feats pretty believe able on screen to where the audience doesn't ask too many questions. 

Physics Rating PGP-13