Are Spectre and Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation Actually The Same Movie?

As writers have long noted, there are only seven plots in literature and movies.

But it seems that the latest Bond film ‘Spectre’ and 'Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation’ have more than a few passing similarities.

Currently getting hefty traffic on Reddit’s movie page is an increasing list of ways in which the two spy movies are essentially telling exactly the same story.

There are, as you might imagine, a few spoilers ahead…

First up, the main characters Bond and Ethan Hunt 'go rogue’, searching for a shadowy organisation of evil folks, the very existence of which is doubted by their superiors.

Then there’s the matter of both organisations under the threat of being mothballed or absorbed into other departments because they’ve become outdated, the 00 program in 'Spectre’ and IMF in 'Mission: Impossible’.

And what about those locations? Both Ethan Hunt and Bond find themselves jetting off and spending a chunk of their movies in both Austria and Morocco.

Strangely specific is the use of bulletproof boxes in both films.

In ’M:I – Rogue Nation’, the villain is caught by being put in a bulletproof box, and in 'Spectre’, Oberhauser is shielded in the MI6 building by a similarly bulletproof box.

And there’s more… side characters being wired to bombs, the bad guy being captured rather than killed, the tech-ey chum coming to the aid of the rogue agent.

Some of these are tropes often used in spy movies – notably the tech-ey chum part, always used in Bond movies (Q), and very raison d'etre for Simon Pegg’s character Benji Dunn in the ’M:I’ movies – but it has to be said, there’s a few uncomfortably similar attributes to both movies here.

Maybe there’s something to be said for that mothballing business…

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Image credits: Sony/Paramount