Tom Cruise s Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible 3
Credit: Film Stills/Stephen Vaughan
“Be honest,” the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Josh Olson asked on Twitter yesterday. “Without looking it up, can you remember the name of Tom Cruise’s character in the Mission: Impossible movies?”
The answer, obviously, is Ethan Hunt – aka “the living manifestation of destiny,” as Alec Baldwin snarled in the series’s fifth instalment. Olson’s underlying point, I think, is that Ethan Hunt isn’t a distinctive name for a man whose athleticism and daring makes him one in seven billion – it doesn’t stand out from the crowd like, say, Norville Quinge. (“Quinge is the living manifestation of destiny!” “This isn’t Mission Difficult, Mr Quinge, it’s Mission Impossible!”) Yet it has always struck me as one of cinema’s great action-hero names, and its smooth simplicity might be its greatest asset.
The Shape of Water, Channel 4, 9.30pm Drawing on influences as varied as Mike Leigh’s film Happy-Go-Lucky and legendary 1950s monster flick The Creature From The Black Lagoon, Mexican horror maestro Guillermo del Torro spins this extraordinary feat of imagination and image-making which wowed the 2018 Oscars with 13 nominations and four wins including Best Picture and Best Director. It was in Happy-Go-Lucky that del Torro saw and was impressed by British actress Sally Hawkins and it was with her in mind that he wrote the character of his heroine – Elisa Esposito, a mute cleaner at a secret government laboratory to which a strange amphibian creature has been sequestered after its capture in a South American river. And here’s where The Creature From The Black Lagoon comes in, a childhood obsession of del Torro’s and a film he was planning to remake at one time.