‘Mission: Impossible – Fallout’ Trailer Breakdown: A Frame-by-Frame Look at the New Footage

As the Mission: Impossible series moves forward, the missions get bigger and Tom Cruise‘s stunts get more dangerous. This is especially true in the first trailer for Mission: Impossible – Fallout, which can only be described as a series of astonishing crashes and falls for Cruise’s death-defying Ethan Hunt, with some plot sprinkled in.

The first trailer for the sixth Mission: Impossible movie debuted Sunday night during the Super Bowl to much buzz, following Ethan Hunt and his IMF team after a botched mission throws their camaraderie into jeopardy and fuels the CIA’s skepticism of Ethan’s loyalty to the U.S. government.

Join us on our frame-by-frame breakdown of the Mission: Impossible – Fallout trailer.

The trailer opens with a moody shot of Ethan Hunt alone, opening up a new mission message, which is already smoking as he closes it wearily. Are the years of backbreaking stunts and world-saving missions finally catching up on him? That’s what familiar baddie Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) taunts him with, as a lone Cruise makes his way into a snow-covered bunker and down a darkened staircase — presumably where Lane is being held.

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it… I wonder, did you ever choose not to?” Lane asks Ethan Hunt. “The end you always feared is coming and the blood will be on your hands. The fallout of all your good intentions.”

Solomon Lane is back with a beard and a less-raspy voice! But I fear he’s not long for this world with the ominous device pressed to his neck, probably to give him some lethal injection for his crimes. But he’ll go out with a bang, sowing doubt and paranoia into Ethan Hunt’s mind with his final words — and the title of the movie!

Here we see our first glimpse of the hall of mirrors that has been teased in a few images. But intriguingly, Ethan Hunt is not accompanied by his IMF team member Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) but by Henry Cavill‘s mysterious Agent August Walker and fellow newcomer Vanessa Kirby, who seems to play a more pivotal role in the movie than we initially thought. We know August Walker will be Ethan Hunt’s eventual foe in this film, but it seems they were teamed up together before things went south.

This appears to be the botched mission that becomes the inciting incident for Fallout, where Hunt was faced with a “terrible choice to make in Berlin. One life over millions.” At least that’s what Secretary Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) says when he reprimands Ethan Hunt after the mission. “And now the entire world is at risk.”

Angela Bassett plays a CIA chief operative and Agent August Walker is her right-hand man, presumably sent to join Ethan Hunt’s team and rectify his mistake — a case of plutonium that went missing after Ethan Hunt chose to save the target of his mission. But as she confers with Secretary Hunley, he objects that the CIA’s objective would kill Ethan’s entire IMF team. “That’s part of the job,” she says coolly.

Here we have Ethan Hunt’s guilt blasting at him from behind in the form of a news cast frantically warning of imminent nuclear attack thanks to the plutonium that Ethan let slip.

More of the original botched mission? The target of the first mission is presumably Solomon Lane — this shot fleshes out the snowy, barbed bunker where Ethan Hunt supposedly finds Solomon. But there’s likely a big chunk of the plot missing from the trailer, and it’s possible that I’m conflating two very separate scenes. It’s possible that the snow-covered bunker is part of the original mission, but Solomon Lane isn’t. Either way, it’s an ominous scene that Ethan’s IMF team stumbles upon in this desolate snowy landscape, with dead soldiers strewn about on the ground and in their cars.

The latter half of the film takes place in an increasingly unstable Paris, which seems to be the target of those nuclear threats. And it’s the city where Ethan Hunt finds himself on the run, chased by…someone.

I love the constant sprinkling of the helicopter that will be the setting for Cruise’s most dangerous and stupid stunt yet. It’s a great way to set the tone, and it sure is damn impressive.

“You don’t understand what you’re involved in,” Ilsa warns Ethan Hunt. It appears like Ethan’s newest ally and team member will turn antagonistic against him once again, delivering him a dire warning before stating that she will stop him if necessary.