Mission: Impossible 7 Faces More Criticism for Using Cruise Ships in Norway

As production on Tom Cruise‘s Mission: Impossible 7 gets underway in Norway, the latest film in the Mission: Impossible franchise is coming under fire again, this time for its use of cruise ships to house the film’s cast and crew. According to a new report, there are concerns that Filipino workers on board two ships being used by the production are being paid low minimum wages.

According to Variety, the production of Mission: Impossible 7 has hired two ships from the Norwegian cruise line Hurtigruten. Two ships, MS Vesterålen and MS Fridtjof Nansen, have been leased to the local production company Truenorth Norway from the end of August through the end of September. The ships are being used to keep the film’s crew in one place as part of measures to prevent COVID-19 infection. Hotel space in the area where filming is to take place is reportedly insufficient.

However, two Norwegian unions have reported the cruise company to the police, alleging the issue of low minimum wages for the Filipino workers on board the ships. While the wage issue is unverified and would possibly be more on the shoulders of the cruise company Hurtigruten, this isn’t the first time the film’s production has come under a bit of scrutiny.

Last month, director and writer Christopher McQuarrie addressed what he said was “inaccurate” about a bridge explosion stunt for the film that would feature the demotion of the more than 100-year-old Pilchowicki bridge in Poland.

“At the very start of the film’s pre-production, we had a rough concept for a sequence involving a bridge over a body of water, ideally one that could be (spoiler alert) partially destroyed,” McQuarrie wrote in a letter to Empire. “While we doubted such a thing would be possible, a broad search was initiated in the unlikely event that any country anywhere in the world might have a bridge that needed getting rid of. Some lovely people from Poland responded with enthusiasm. They just happened to know of a non-functioning railroad bridge in an area that suited our purposes. And, better yet, the area in question was eager to promote tourism.”

He went on to explain that the portions of the bridge to be destroyed in the film were done in cooperation with the Polish government thus allowing the unsafe portions to be rebuilt, but possible retaliation for a perceived slight exacerbated the issue regarding the bridge.

“After harassing members of our production publicly and anonymously on social media, as well as privately, this individual misrepresented our intentions and concealed their personal reasons for wanting to penalize us,” McQuarrie wrote. “They even tried to have this condemned, unsafe and unusable bridge landmarked in the hopes of preventing it from ever being removed and rebuilt (which we understand would be to the detriment of the area’s economic needs). Then they reached out to us to gloat about it. In short, this individual manipulated the emotional response of the people in a move that has now compromised our ambitions to bring our production to Poland.”

Mission: Impossible 7 stars Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Rebecca Ferguson, Pom Klementieff, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, and Shea Whigham. It’s expected to open in theaters on November 19, 2021.