'Mission: Impossible – Fallout' Trailer Breakdown: A Frame-By-Frame Look At The New Footage

As the Mission: Impossible series moves forward, the missions get bigger and Tom Cruise's stunts get more dangerous. This is especially true in the first trailer for Mission: Impossible – Fallout, which can only be described as a series of astonishing crashes and falls for Cruise's death-defying Ethan Hunt, with some plot sprinkled in.

The first trailer for the sixth Mission: Impossible movie debuted Sunday night during the Super Bowl to much buzz, following Ethan Hunt and his IMF team after a botched mission throws their camaraderie into jeopardy and fuels the CIA's skepticism of Ethan's loyalty to the U.S. government.

Join us on our frame-by-frame breakdown of the Mission: Impossible – Fallout trailer.

The trailer opens with a moody shot of Ethan Hunt alone, opening up a new mission message, which is already smoking as he closes it wearily. Are the years of backbreaking stunts and world-saving missions finally catching up on him? That's what familiar baddie Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) taunts him with, as a lone Cruise makes his way into a snow-covered bunker and down a darkened staircase — presumably where Lane is being held.

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it... I wonder, did you ever choose not to?" Lane asks Ethan Hunt. "The end you always feared is coming and the blood will be on your hands. The fallout of all your good intentions."

Solomon Lane is back with a beard and a less-raspy voice! But I fear he's not long for this world with the ominous device pressed to his neck, probably to give him some lethal injection for his crimes. But he'll go out with a bang, sowing doubt and paranoia into Ethan Hunt's mind with his final words — and the title of the movie!

Here we see our first glimpse of the hall of mirrors that has been teased in a few images. But intriguingly, Ethan Hunt is not accompanied by his IMF team member Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) but by Henry Cavill's mysterious Agent August Walker and fellow newcomer Vanessa Kirby, who seems to play a more pivotal role in the movie than we initially thought. We know August Walker will be Ethan Hunt's eventual foe in this film, but it seems they were teamed up together before things went south.

This appears to be the botched mission that becomes the inciting incident for Fallout, where Hunt was faced with a "terrible choice to make in Berlin. One life over millions." At least that's what Secretary Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) says when he reprimands Ethan Hunt after the mission. "And now the entire world is at risk."

Angela Bassett plays a CIA chief operative and Agent August Walker is her right-hand man, presumably sent to join Ethan Hunt's team and rectify his mistake — a case of plutonium that went missing after Ethan Hunt chose to save the target of his mission. But as she confers with Secretary Hunley, he objects that the CIA's objective would kill Ethan's entire IMF team. "That's part of the job," she says coolly.

Here we have Ethan Hunt's guilt blasting at him from behind in the form of a news cast frantically warning of imminent nuclear attack thanks to the plutonium that Ethan let slip.

More of the original botched mission? The target of the first mission is presumably Solomon Lane — this shot fleshes out the snowy, barbed bunker where Ethan Hunt supposedly finds Solomon. But there's likely a big chunk of the plot missing from the trailer, and it's possible that I'm conflating two very separate scenes. It's possible that the snow-covered bunker is part of the original mission, but Solomon Lane isn't. Either way, it's an ominous scene that Ethan's IMF team stumbles upon in this desolate snowy landscape, with dead soldiers strewn about on the ground and in their cars.

The latter half of the film takes place in an increasingly unstable Paris, which seems to be the target of those nuclear threats. And it's the city where Ethan Hunt finds himself on the run, chased by...someone.

I love the constant sprinkling of the helicopter that will be the setting for Cruise's most dangerous and stupid stunt yet. It's a great way to set the tone, and it sure is damn impressive.

"You don't understand what you're involved in," Ilsa warns Ethan Hunt. It appears like Ethan's newest ally and team member will turn antagonistic against him once again, delivering him a dire warning before stating that she will stop him if necessary.

Ilsa! We were rooting for you! The former double agent may be struggling with her issues of loyalty again, as she and Ethan have a delightfully tense face-off in the streets of Paris. She may have a machine gun and a motorcycle, but she is still standing up against Ethan in a car, and he has no qualms with running her over — which may indict him more than her.

If that injection didn't kill Solomon Lane, this flood of water certainly will. In a very cool shot, Lane's cell gets flooded with a wave of water, though we admittedly don't see what happens in the aftermath. Is this Ethan and the IMF team's original mission? To save Solomon from a planned assassination so that he can go on trial? Or foil an attempted breakout?

Thus begins the montage of what I like to call "Tom Cruise taking the movie title too literally." The trailer flashes through a series of stunts that Cruise performed for this film, mainly involving Ethan Hunt crashing and/or falling into objects. It's a lot.

Who is Ethan Hunt trying to attack before he is held back by Luther (Ving Rhames)? Judging by the hair, it looks like a woman in that hospital bed — perhaps Ilsa? Or someone else entirely who could be blamed for his current predicament?

In a fast-paced fight scene, Ethan Hunt and August Walker are fighting a team of East Asian agents. So this could take place before Ethan Hunt "turns," or later when the two of them make an inevitable begrudging alliance. Because who can resist Henry Cavill's beard?

Again, here is August Walker with Ethan Hunt's IMF team, and an unidentified person in the passenger seat with a bag over their head. But judging by the straitjacket that the person is wearing, it is likely Solomon Walker. It's becoming increasingly clear that he plays a pivotal part in this nuclear threat, and perhaps has information that the CIA and IMF need.

Vanessa Kirby is playing a lounge singer who seems to moonlight as an agent of sorts — perhaps infiltrating the nefarious organization that now holds the plutonium. Later in this scene, we see that coveted case of plutonium in this same room as Ethan Hunt walks through. I'm not sure yet if this room is on the side of the government or some villainous organization.

We finally see Michelle Monaghan return to the Mission: Impossible franchise as Ethan's oft-damseled wife Julia! It seems like she won't take part of any of the action, simply asking Luther how Ethan has been doing.

There it is, the highly anticipated helicopter stunt! It involves Ethan climbing up a rope hanging from the helicopter while it is in flight, and taking over piloting. This stunt seems to be part of a larger sequence where he is being chased by August Walker, who has his own flying craft...only he is armed with a machine gun.

I included this brief cutaway scene from the montage of Cruise's stunts because I found it hilarious, a moment where the movie winks at the franchise's own penchant for going overboard with its action sequences. "What the hell is he doing?" Ilsa asks, bewildered. "I find it best not to look," Benji (Simon Pegg) replies, which is a wonderfully self-aware moment.

Finally, here's August Walker in full-on Big Bad mode, ostensibly shooting at Ethan Hunt as he desperately tries to comandeer and pilot a helicopter. The trailer has been intriguingly vague about whether August will be the true villain of the movie, so it's possible that we could be fooled into thinking he's Ethan's foe through a series of clever editing tricks and red herrings. He's the one, after all, who casts doubt over Ethan's loyalties, asking, "How many times has Hunt's government betrayed him, disavowed him, cast him aside? How long before a man like that has had enough?"

Mission Impossible – Fallout hits theaters on July 27, 2018.