5 Gadgets In The Mission: Impossible Franchise That We Wish Were Real
The thing that sets the "Mission: Impossible" franchise apart from its contemporaries is, obviously, Tom Cruise. His willingness and ability to perform spectacular feats of stunt work for real give these movies an edge that no other film series can compete with. However, the Ethan Hunt character is not going into all of these situations completely on his own. He is often aided by a piece of technology, many of which are firmly placed in the realm of science fiction. Sometimes, Hunt is entirely reliant on the tech, and in other situations, he has to problem-solve when the tech fails.
In our desire to want to exist in the escapist fantasies that are the "Mission: Impossible" films, we naturally wish that many of these far-fetched items existed in our reality. Of course, we could never actually be Tom Cruise or Ethan Hunt, but having the tech available to us might give us a fighting chance. Across the seven released films, from 1996's "Mission: Impossible" to 2023's "Dead Reckoning Part One," the series is filled with fun gadgets. Here are five that would be awesome to use in your normal life.
These may not be the flashiest or most extreme gadgets in the franchise, but they are the ones that could actually be an attribute to a person. As cool as the masks are, there isn't a practical use to seamlessly pretend to be another person unless you were a spy or engaging in some pretty nefarious behavior. So, no masks, even if they are really cool.
Climbing gloves
We begin this list with a piece of tech from the fourth film in the series, 2011's "Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol." Out of all the movies, this is the one that features the most advanced tech, though the whole point of having so much tech in the movie is for it to all fail, so Ethan Hunt constantly has his back against the wall in stressful situations. That being said, if these things did exist and did work perfectly, this movie could be used to completely populate the entire list.
Without question, the most desirable gadget from "Ghost Protocol" is the climbing gloves Ethan wears to climb up the outside of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai for the film's central set piece. These electromagnetic gloves imitate the properties of a gecko-like creature that allows the wearer to stick themselves to a surface as they climb it, moving their hands in a rolling motion to continuously unstick and stick themselves the higher they go.
Now, in the film, one of the gloves does short out on Ethan, but if this were actually developed and sold to the public, they would probably iron out the issues before giving it an initial test run on the tallest building in the world. Plenty of traditional climbers would probably denigrate these gloves for not being "true" climbing, but a lot more people would certainly be getting out in the world to scale large structures far more often.
Contact copier
"Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol" features a smart contact lens that does a lot of things, such as scanning for a specific face in a crowd. However, that is not why this contact lens would make for an exciting gadget to have in the real world. Shortly after Ethan Hunt scales the Burj Khalifa, the IMF team is thrust into a meeting involving the transfer of nuclear launch codes. Because of how things are set up, Jeremy Renner's William Brandt needs to wear one of these smart contact lenses for it to make copies of these launch codes that are instantly printed in another room.
Copy machines can be a total pain. Physically having to go over to the machine, which may be in an out-of-the-way location in your office or home, to make a copy takes up time for something that should be rather instantaneous. If that machine is also a printer, that can cause many issues, especially if they need to be connected over Wi-Fi.
From personal experience, I always find myself having to restart and reconnect my printer to my device or the internet every single time I print something. Wearing a contact lens, where your blink acts as a shutter that copies the paper in front of you, is just a major time saver. Sure, putting something in your eye can be uncomfortable, but you'd be able to make a lot more copies a lot faster if you did it.
Perspective-shifting screen
Although I mentioned at the top that this list was going to be filled with fairly practical pieces of tech from the "Mission: Impossible" franchise, this entry is a bit of an exception. This will also be the final gadget from "Ghost Protocol." During a scene in which Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt and Simon Pegg's Benji Dunn have to break into the Kremlin, they whip out this collapsable screen, and on the back of it is a camera fixed to a moving arm. The camera points away from the screen to capture what would be seen if the screen was not present, which is then projected onto the screen. The arm is programmed to move to keep the camera tied to the person's point of view on the other side of the screen.
In the movie, the application for this is deception and stealth, and those are most likely its best applications. However, I could see this being used in a gaming scenario. This screen that tracks your point of view and movement could be what Microsoft hoped the Kinect could be all those years ago. For people who are not sold on VR but want a higher level of physical interactivity with their gameplay, this device could work wonders for that. Sure, this is mostly a justification of practicality to get it onto the list, but it's not a horrible idea.
File wiping device
Deleting files from a hard drive isn't an enormous hassle, but depending on the size of that hard drive, the deletion process could take more time than you would like. Of course, there's also plugging it in, typing in your password if you have one, and selecting every file to give that hard drive a complete sweep. Well, you don't need to do that in the "Mission: Impossible" universe. You just need your smartphone.
In 2015's "Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation," Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faust has a thumb drive that gets completely wiped clean because she unknowingly places it atop her boss' phone, which can delete everything on the drive just through touch. No plugging in or anything. In fact, there are several sheets of newspaper between the drive and the phone, but the files get deleted anyway.
That is one powerful wireless system if the two devices don't even need to be in direct contact. This is a very simple device, and while it might not be a smartphone that does this, it would not be shocking to see a device like this out in the world.
Automatic lock cracker
We need to get a little more nefarious for the final gadget on the list, which once again returns us to "Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation." Cracking locks is a common part of the spycraft trade — or, at least, the movie spycraft trade. At multiple points in "Rogue Nation," members of the IMF can pick different kinds of locks in unique ways. In one scene, a door lock is opened by what looks to be a small attachment for a smartphone that can maneuver through the lock, expediting the manual lock pick process.
The more impressive cracker comes when Simon Pegg's Benji places a small metal ring around a rotary lock mechanism, which can precisely decode how the lock needs to be rotated. In movies, locks like these are typically opened through a painstaking process of trying to hear the clicks of the notches in the lock, but this ring allows characters to bypass all of that. Unlike the perspective-shifting screen, this device has no alternative practical use. It is just for safe cracking and lock picking. While it would be a major boon to all those thieves out there, it's not exactly a day-to-day item for your average person.
This list could have featured so many more things, from voice changers to exploding gum to an orange foam that breaks through metal (and, of course, the masks), but these five pieces of tech could be used by a lot of different people, not just super spies.