How Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Homages A Beloved Jack Ryan Film

This article contains spoilers for "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One."

While it might be leagues ahead of some other blockbuster franchises of late, there's no doubt that throughout the seven "Mission: Impossible" movies, Tom Cruise has made an effort to pay homage to what has come before. Still standing as the most successful big-screen adaptation of a television show, Ethan Hunt's adventures have taken as much from Buster Keaton as the original spy series. Interestingly though, it's in the opening moments of "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One" that the latest installment involving our favorite IMF agents applies a method more notably used for another respected espionage hero.

Before Tom is running, driving, and diving from locations no mere mortal should consider, "Dead Reckoning Part One" drops us deep in the ocean where a Russian submarine is playing around with a top-secret weapon. Throwing us in among the crew, we hear the captain speaking in his native tongue, before the film, instead of using subtitles, shifts the whole conversation seamlessly into English so we can figure out just what is going on. It's a clever creative choice that prevents the audience from getting lost in translation and a method most notably used in "The Hunt for Red October," the beloved Jack Ryan adaptation starring former "Mission: Impossible" alumni Alec Baldwin.

For many, Jack Ryan may only be the CIA analyst that looks like the slacker from Dunder Mifflin in "The Office," but long before John Krasinski took the role, Alec Baldwin brought the character to the big screen in "The Hunt for Red October." Prior to appearing in two of the "Mission: Impossible" films as Alan Hunley, Baldwin took on the mantle of Ryan in 1990, where he worked alongside Sean Connery. The story saw Baldwin's Ryan team up with Connery's Russian Navy Captain Marko Ramius to avert World War III. Early on in the film, director John McTiernan uses one of Ramius' lieutenant's recital of a book in Russian to act as the transition to English in a manner that's as seamless as it is here in Hunt's latest mission.

It could just be a coincidence. However, this is "Mission: Impossible," and nothing is thrown in by chance, so using the same tactic to translate yet another Russian sub out at sea certainly feels like a homage to the gripping thriller. While "Mission: Impossible" might be riffing from Jack Ryan's toolbox, though, make no mistake, that iconic CIA hero may have taken many forms over the years, but in the end, there really is only one Ethan Hunt, after all.