If you've seen Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol and you're an avid spoiler avoider like I am, perhaps you already know where this article is going. In his first live-action film, Brad Bird commits one of the biggest sins a spoiler dodger can dream of: he shows clips of the movie we're about to see during the opening credits, revealing major plot points and hurting the film in the process. This is, plain and simple, a bad sign for the future of movies.
The act of including spoilers in the opening credits isn't anything new for this film series: Brian De Palma chose to include images from his film in the opening credits to the first Mission: Impossible movie back in 1996.
The images above flash by so quickly, the viewer barely has time to recognize what's happening. The montage is meticulously planned, giving nothing away and sometimes slamming two images together that play out in totally different sequences of the film. It's purposefully disorienting, introducing the audience to the mindset of Ethan Hunt: constantly scanning, re-scanning, and processing information. (This isn't the only time De Palma has walked a fine line with spoilers for his own films: in 2002, he took the concept to a ridiculous degree with the trailer for Femme Fatale, which shows the entire movie condensed down to two minutes in one of the most interesting trailers I've ever seen.)
Contrast this with what Bird does in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, and there's a clear difference. The images that appear over those opening credits reveal at least one major plot point and give flashes of fight scenes that take place during the film's climax. (To make my point, I have to give away a spoiler for MI:4 now, so skip to the next paragraph if you haven't seen the film.) The most egregious example that I remember here is the decision to show a nuclear warhead launching out of the water. This turns into a big plot point late in the film, with Ethan and company racing to stop the launch from happening. By showing us in the opening minutes that this already happened, it robs the scene of any dramatic tension. We already know it's going to launch, so when it does in the movie and everyone seems shocked, we're already bored and ready to move on to the next scene. It's a disservice to the movie, and a disservice to the audience who paid for it.
Why include the spoilery clips at all? They are interspersed with a pretty cool CGI fuse burning through the titles and set to an interpretation of the iconic Mission: Impossible theme song. Why isn't that good enough? There's no need to "sell" the audience on your movie by showing clips of it--that's what trailers are for. The marketing department has already succeeded by getting us in the theater, so why risk ruining what we've already paid for?
I can already hear the naysayers launching into the comments with defenses like, "you shouldn't come to these movies for the story" and "it's all about the spectacle anyway," but most of the time, those are pretty dismissive arguments. They assume the story and characters aren't worth emotional investment, and you only have to look as far as the most recent interview with any good director to find that many filmmakers actually do care about those elements (or at least they do a good job of pretending to). I doubt you'd ever find this conversation about spoilers in the opening credits taking place around any other genre, but that shouldn't mean that we don't need to take action movie characters or their conflicts at least somewhat seriously. If we're not intended to invest in characters, we may as well be watching a montage sequence of fight scenes and explosions one after another with no story or dialogue.
It could be that I'm blowing this out of proportion. It could be that Mr. Bird was merely paying homage to the first film in this franchise and the television series before it (which, if old YouTube videos are any indication, used this same strategy before each episode). If that's the case, there's a better way to do it - one that doesn't involve robbing the audience of the drama of a story. Show close ups of Tom Cruise running or, if you absolutely have to, choose clips already shown in the trailers that presumably got the audience into the theater in the first place. But if this is the beginning of a new trend in modern action films, our mission (should we choose to accept it, naturally) is to try to do something about it before it contaminates our viewing experiences further. And if all that means is talking about it, let's start the conversation.