LIQUID DROPS IN 'MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE' AND 'MINORITY REPORT'
The tumblr Tea and a Movie ("Watching movies, drinking tea") has posted a series of juxtaposed frame captures from Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible (1996) and Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (2002). The presence of Tom Cruise in both scenes perhaps makes it clear that these two film scenes are in dialogue with each other. However, this is a dialogue that began (perhaps) with the drops of water in Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993), which was adapted by David Koepp, who adapted Carlito's Way for De Palma that same year, and who went on to be De Palma's choice for screenwriter on Mission: Impossible. Following that, Spielberg and Koepp kept the dialogue going a year later with a wild scene in The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) that, short of having a Tom Cruise stop just shy of hitting the floor and setting off the alarm of a CIA vault, had Julianne Moore fall and smash face-down, spread eagle onto the rear window of a trailer that has been pushed over a cliff. Spielberg mines the suspense in this scene as a direct "check-this-out" homage to his friend, De Palma, as Moore tries delicately to remove herself from the shattered glass with minimal movement. Koepp included a similar suspense scene in one of his Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man movies, and in Minority Report, Spielberg also borrows a visual idea from De Palma's Snake Eyes (1998) (which again had a screenplay written by Koepp) by having the camera track through a building overhead, moving from room to room with a "God's eye" view.
Check out the full tumblr juxtapositions at Tea and a Movie.
Updated: Tuesday, August 16, 2016 12:30 AM CDT
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