• McQuarrie's scattered and capricious camera direction meets a cinematographer who is plainly not up to the task of wrangling his boss's whims into anything resembling a coherent aesthetic. I cannot begin to express how disastrously this impacts the editing: virtually every single dialogue scene bounces around coverage that doesn't fit together in the least, the thing is rife with showy camera placement gestures that signify absolutely nothing at all, close-ups are leaned on so heavily that they become meaningless and suffocating, and key action and blocking beats are just plain not covered. Just dire stuff.

• The textural elements are scarcely any better. Others have noted the bafflingly thin digital* photography, and yeah: the fact that Taggart & co. managed to make the Sony Venice system look this shabby is actively astonishing to me. That's a data-rich image they've got there, and this film features shot after shot wherein skintones look smeared beyond recognition and highlights clip in ways that call all the attention in the world to the sloppiness of the image formation going on.

• Some remarkably ropey lighting going on throughout. Tons of unfiltered stage fixtures that scream "artifice", and not in that interesting Kaminski way: compositions are routinely flattened out in the most brutal way.

• Gimbal jitters. So many gimbal jitters.

• Lorne Balfe's management of tone here is, if anything, worse than his already disastrous work in FALLOUT. Just the most exhausting kind of repetitive tonal badgering. Goofy bits of self-aware nonsense, apocalyptic reveals, and playful flirtation are all flattened into one big BWAAAAAAHM of brass, overbearing war drums, and repetitive ostinatos.

• The dangers of aggressive digital de-aging on display: Cruise jumps around in apparent age from ~40s to ~60s depending on the angle.

• Vanessa Kirby is doing far and away the best work of anyone here. Her parody of Hayley Atwell's mannerisms and tics is just choice. She's a better Atwell than Atwell. More of her and less of everyone else, please. Well, except for Czerny and Whigham: they can stay.

• Including a character who, after seven movies, has finally cracked the code of masks by realizing "wait, I can just tug on everyone's face!" is a wholly wonderful bit of goofiness, and casting Shea Whigham as that specific character edges right into "I was wrong, these filmmakers are geniuses" territory.

• The speeches that tend to close these films are entering the Mike Stoklasa Picard Improv zone.

* IT'S [hand claps emoji] THE [hand claps emoji] [hand claps emoji] NOT [hand claps emoji] THE [hand claps emoji] TOOLS