-There seemed to be more plot in this one? In a way that could be seen as either confusing or intricate. A bit like the usual Mission Impossible script took a brief trip through the "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy"/"Smiley's People" car wash. Still fun, but more to pay attention to and higher stakes, so also more intense.
-Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg are rapidly becoming actors who I will watch in anything. THEY ARE AWESOME IN THIS, despite a bit of clunky direction in a few spots where the emotional transition for characters in a scene wasn't handled as deftly as it could have been and was a bit jarring, but that's just my film studies talking. They are great and there are some of their scenes I want to watch again and again (my watching notebook has many scrawlings of their character names with lots of extra vowels in them :-D).
-HEY J. IT HAS WAY MORE LUTHER. And after the opening credits the heights were less intense than prior MI films, and only in well-warned and avoidable ways.
-With the MI films after the first one, I'm not particularly worried about what happens to Ethan Hunt or what he's doing, but I care about the team. It seems to me that this film does too, and that makes me happy.