Mission: Interpolation

Tom Cruise has posted a video alongside Mission: Impossible – Fallout director Christopher McQuarrie, encouraging fans to adjust their television settings to improve their viewing experience of the film, and we ache for when we had that enthusiasm.

It’s normal to feel uncomfortable watching Tom Cruise staring down a camera lens at you for a quick chat. We’re still trying to work out if the act has left us brainwashed, but we do know the nuances of frames in a shot of an action film we didn’t bother to catch at the cinema isn’t going to prompt a Google search on how to switch off interpolation. The difference would be so lost on us.

The setting is default on most high-definition televisions and apparently makes films look like they were shot on a cheap camera, causing what is referred to as the “soap-opera effect”. God forbid we confuse EastEnders, a decades-old concept still being flogged to this day, with anything starring Tom Cruise.

The way we watch films has devolved. The human eye has adapted to low-bandwidth streams of straight-to-Netflix Adam Sandler jaunts and our brains can only process brief Saturday Night Live sketches on YouTube before needing an hour-long nap. If they make yet more Mission: Impossible films – and they will – they should shoot them on iPhones. We promise we won’t care.

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