May 22, 1996

By my count, there are ten summer of ’96 movies that turned out to be the first of a series. Usually only a series of two, though. THE CRAFT, TWISTER, THE ARRIVAL, ERASER, THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, THE NUTTY PROFESSOR, INDEPENDENCE DAY, and TRAINSPOTTING each got one sequel. Five of those were decades later, three were direct-to-video. DRAGONHEART had surprising longevity, with its fourth DTV sequel released in 2020. But only MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, which reached its 30th anniversary last week, got seven theatrical sequels, all with Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames returning, all good in my opinion. Most of them very good. So it’s arguably the best summer of ’96 movie and the most consequential.

I have reviewed it before, eleven years ago, so consider this a companion review, because I stand by what I wrote then. I still think MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE is a prime example of a blockbuster done right, because yes, “it’s a big movie star vehicle, based on an existing ‘property,’ climaxes in a noisy special effects-laden action spectacle, did end up becoming a franchise,” but “it is a Brian De Palma movie, it doesn’t feel like he had to compromise anything. He got to take his style and his interests and experiment with them on a little larger canvas than usual.” It’s still something I get excited for when it happens – a visionary director getting a budget to put their stamp on some familiar piece of pop culture – but the franchise machinery has gotten so much stronger. They’re better at keeping somebody like that under control, plugging them into an existing thing, letting them kind of make it theirs, but not entirely. That would be reckless. They’d have to disavow them.

The movie came out 30 years after the show started. Seems like a pretty big gap, but the Flipper show was two years older. THE FLINTSTONES came 28 years after the show, THE ADDAMS FAMILY about 27, THE BRADY BUNCH about 26, so I guess we could say that thirty-ish years old is pretty standard for tv shows to be made into movies in the ‘90s. This is what you did back then, you took a tv show from the ‘60s and you remade it as a movie. Paramount had had the rights for a while, but it was Cruise who finally made it happen (as his movie between INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE and JERRY MAGUIRE), choosing it for the first movie from his production company with Paula Wagner. That’s why he’s always been so central to the series, not just as the lead but also choosing the directors and having such a collaborative relationship with them. They didn’t hire him, he hired them.

Cruise said in a discussion for Collider many years later that he used to live down the street from Steven Spielberg and would always go over and ask him questions about his movies. One day he went over and DePalma was there, so the three of them had dinner and talked movies. He claims after he went home he stayed up rewatching DePalma’s movies for 14 hours straight and became convinced he had to do MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE.

Recruiting a director of his level was unusual for a movie like this. The other summer blockbusters were mostly by newish directors like Roland Emmerich, Jan de Bont and Michael Bay. Going over the biggest hits of the last thirty years there are numerous blockbusters from accomplished directors like Steven Spielberg and James Cameron, but usually it’s a situation where pretty new directors have established themselves just enough to make their dream project (the Wachowskis doing THE MATRIX as movie #2) or to be given the big studio gig: Alfonso Cuarón doing a HARRY POTTER as his fifth movie (and topping the veteran who started the series), Colin Trevorrow doing JURASSIC WORLD as his third, Ryan Coogler doing BLACK PANTHER as his third, Gareth Edwards doing GODZILLA as his second, or of course J.J. Abrams doing MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III as his first, Brad Bird doing MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL as his first live action, Christopher McQuarrie doing MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – ROGUE NATION as his third.

There are many examples of directors going blockbuster for movie #4: Bryan Singer and X-MEN, Gore Verbinski and CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, Christopher Nolan and BATMAN BEGINS, Jon Favreau and IRON MAN, Matt Reeves and DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, Rian Johnson and THE LAST JEDI, Greta Gerwig and BARBIE, Barry Jenkins and MUFASA: THE LION KING. FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING was Peter Jackson’s seventh film, but since he had mostly done low budget horror movies it feels like a different category, and a precursor to Sam Raimi doing SPIDER-MAN, James Gunn doing GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, and Adam Wingard doing GODZILLA VS. KONG.

I guess the closest comparison I could find is Denis Villeneuve, because he’d been directing for nearly 20 years, making acclaimed films in multiple countries and languages when he did BLADE RUNNER 2049. But he had less than half as many movies under his belt than DePalma did in ’96. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE was his 22nd movie! The guy had been directing since about the time of Mission: Impossible season 3. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE was the biggest budget he’d ever had, over $30 million more than the out of control BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. The only time he’ll make a more expensive movie will be MISSION TO MARS.

If I found all these statistics more interesting than you did, then my apologies, but I really want to underline how fucking cool it is that a movie star pushed to get one of the great directors to do his fun time action thriller, and it worked out for both parties. It wasn’t a sellout situation. It wasn’t slumming. It was DePalma making this movie better than anyone else could’ve, and this movie allowing him to stretch in ways he’d never been able to before. The digital mask removals are a gimmick that wore out quickly, but man were they cool at the time. The visual effects heavy Chunnel sequence was a new kind of thrill. Neither is really what the movie is remembered for anymore or where De Palma shined the strongest, but they’re the kinds of things he could just throw in there as a bonus, before anybody else did it.

DePalma designed the action sequences before there was a finished script, so everything had to be built around them, which ended up being similar to the method Cruise developed with Christopher McQuarrie years later (though in that case they were often already filming those sequences before they knew how they’d connect). Reportedly they kept the basic plot from an earlier Gloria Katz & Willard Huyck (HOWARD THE DUCK) script, Cruise brought in his friend Robert Towne (TEQUILA SUNRISE), who came up with a beginning, middle and end, and DePalma worked with David Koepp (I COME IN PEACE) to fill in the rest.

It’s kind of funny to read the 1996 reviews now. A movie that 30 years later seems undeniable, you check what people were saying at the time, and there it is – they’re denying it! Even a positive review by Rene Rodriguez in the Miami Herald concedes that “It’s a soulless trinket, and it never really grabs you the way good action films do,” while Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer says it “doesn’t have the momentum or suspense of De Palma’s best pictures.” That’s what happens, though. An old movie always seems sophisticated and adult by modern standards, and then you check and at the time people thought oh great, more of this idiotic bullshit we have now. I always remember that I loved JURASSIC PARK but had to include the caveat that it was much stupider than JAWS. I haven’t had to say that for a long time.

One consistent thing between positive and negative reviews: they say it’s really complicated, very hard to follow, maybe impossible. Is it only because I’ve seen it so many times that it doesn’t seem that difficult to me? I don’t remember having a problem with it, but it’s been a while.

Back then there was always grumbling about what to do after the Cold War, convinced that things had changed entirely, maybe spy stories were obsolete. Mark Caro of the Chicago Tribune wrote under the headline “MISSION: UNACCOMPLISHED” that “despite the cinematic bravado, this mission ultimately represents a white flag being waved at the notion of updating the TV show. The movie seems to argue that because the Cold War is over, all the good global-conspiracy plots have become obsolete. The intrigue, instead, must turn in on itself like a snake devouring its own tail.” Hal Hinson of the Washington Post, on the other hand, wrote that “From the beginning, the action appears dated, as if the filmmakers were still locked in a Cold War mind-set.”

Seems to me that they’re both wrong. The snake devouring its tail is in fact the correct move, and the mindset is not dated, because here we are 30 years later and that story still works. Nobody has to say, “Well, you see, back then…”

To me it’s a timeless classic, so I get a kick out of the little moments that do seem goofy now, like the opening scene where Ethan is in disguise for an op and I don’t think we’re supposed to realize it’s him (staging it so we just see him through a security camera is a clever way to hide the makeup), but after three more decades of Tom Cruise superstardom all his tics are so familiar that you can tell it’s him instantly even with the sound off. Also it’s kinda funny when we see Cruise on a tv playing the actual senator who Ethan will disguise himself as. That seems like cheating.

Obviously there’s some 1996 tech in a high tech movie from 1996. Ethan searches Usenet newsgroups for information at one point. Though not accurate to how it actually worked, it’s not nearly as ridiculous as THE NET or HACKERS or something. But also he has glasses with lenses that broadcast live video, as if he got Meta glasses three decades early. Coulda been an influencer if he’d only invented Instagram.

The Langley break-in scene is still a masterwork, only weakened by the fact that I’ve watched it so many times. But you know, when I watch HALLOWEEN every Halloween I eventually need to give it a break for a while for it to kick in again. I’m not sure how well younger generations know that image of Ethan lowering from the ceiling, but man was it iconic for some years there.

Now we’ve seen Cruise as Ethan hanging off of planes and skyscrapers and jumping motorcycles off of cliffs and breaking records for holding his breath and shit, so I hardly even think of hanging from wires as a stunt. Same goes for running from the exploding fish tanks, but he did really do that after a version with a stuntman didn’t look good enough.

The train sequence is interesting in retrospect. They’re blowing 140 mph wind at his face but you can tell the background is bluescreened so you just assume it’s not real. What at the time was innovative (using digital effects with stunts to create extreme action) is now what most movies are. In fact, the sequels ended up feeling like an antidote to that as they put more and more emphasis on envelope-pushing practical stuntwork where you wouldn’t notice any effects. So it doesn’t hold up as well as equivalent scenes in later MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movies, yet it works because Brian De Palma knows how to thrill you with visual storytelling.

Speaking of the devil (masterful uses of cinematic language), I still love the scene where Phelps (Jon Voight in his followup to HEAT) tells Ethan that Kittridge (Henry Czerny, CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER) was the one who killed off their team, and Ethan goes through what happened step by step to verbally explain how he must’ve done it, while on screen we see what he’s actually thinking about, which is how Phelps must’ve done it. I remember arguing with people at the time who thought that part was confusing, which seems so silly now. I don’t think you need a black belt in cinema to understand what is being communicated there. But I think by using that technique DePalma showed a respect for the intelligence of the audience in a summer where “turn off your brain, it’s not supposed to be Shakespeare” seemed to be everybody else’s motto.

For the apparent ending of the series last year they tied back to these 1996 beginnings. Czerny as Kittridge was brought back for the final two films (now CIA director). Rolf Saxon was brought back as CIA analyst Donloe for a 29-years-in-the-making payoff where we find out he was in fact transferred to Alaska as Kittridge orders, and they somehow made a moving story out of that joke as Donloe found happiness in exile and also gets to help save the world. Vanessa Redrgrave’s Max never came back in the series, but Vanessa Kirby plays a character in the last three films who is revealed to be her daughter.

I talked in the old review about the controversy over Phelps turning out to be the villain. I can understand it in theory but since I don’t really know the show I get to appreciate that it was cool and audacious to do that. And I’m afraid that’s most of the world by now. As pearl-clutching pop culture enthusiasts we get mad when some thing we love gets remade, even though the original will still exist, and I think part of the worry is that young people will just know the new one and never bother with the old one. But really that’s not usually the case; the original TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and DAWN OF THE DEAD are still beloved and gaining new fans all the time, even though people liked their remakes.

Maybe you do have to worry about it with tv shows, though. They get old and forgotten. With MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE the movies really have replaced the tv show in the popular imagination. More than once I’ve encountered millennials and younger who had no idea it was ever anything but a series of Tom Cruise movies. Jim Phelps must be rolling in his grave. And he deserves it, the fucking traitor. Roll harder, asshole.