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Begotten of a TV show it has long since eclipsed in iconography and popularity, the Mission: Impossible film series belongs to the rarest pedigree of pop-IP remakes and adaptations. Not only more successful, longer-running, and, quite frankly, better than its source material, the franchise has also demonstrably influenced and improved the landscape of American action cinema. With the ostensible finale hitting theaters this spring in the form of The Final Reckoning, we accept this mission to celebrate a modern blockbuster staple with a weekly retrospective.
This is my first time discussing Mission: Impossible on the site in any real capacity, but those who know me well have probably heard me sing its praises more times than they care to. I don’t know that I’d normally think of it as “one of my favorite franchises,” but I suppose it is! I feel strongly that these movies have left an indelible mark on American action films—more so than they generally get credit for in discussions on the subject.
But for all my proclaimed adoration of “The Thrilling Adventures of Ethan Hunt and the Friends He Made Along the Way,” I’m a relatively recent convert. I have not been on the bandwagon since the beginning. On top of the fact that I was less than one year old when the first film released, I just never paid the series any mind until fifteen years deep, with the fourth film, Ghost Protocol.
To get technical, though, my true entry point into the franchise was the DVD season sets of the 1966 TV show, which I think my parents got from the Cracker Barrel gift shop, of all places, when I was young. Upon revisiting Ghost Protocol for the first time in a few years, I’m reminded of those old DVDs in a way I didn’t expect.
The fourth film isn’t exactly a return to the franchise’s roots. One could argue it actually pushes the series further toward silly, high-octane sci-fi action and away from more procedural espionage like the TV show or the first film. But it feels distinct from the first three films for a number of reasons, one being a shift in focus that feels like a subtle harkening back to the show: team dynamics.
From my memory (though fuzzy), the original show was actually pretty cool. The idea of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) was really exciting to me as a kid: a secret team, officially unacknowledged by their own government, comprised of almost entirely part-timers. This meant that all of these people had very different lives and jobs outside of their missions. Each member had different specializations on the job — a trait not atypical of other, similar spy teams across fiction, but in this case, their day jobs informed their mission focuses. So it really felt like a cobbling together of different people from different backgrounds and made the team feel more diverse and vibrant, rather than simply a group of career field agents.
Martin Landau’s character, Rollin Hand, for example, was an actor and makeup artist, so in missions, he was the one who made and wore most of the iconic flesh masks that would become one of the few prevalent concepts to be carried over into the movies. The team’s lineup shuffled around a bit from one season to the next, but over the course of the series, the team included included a fashion model, weightlifter, electronics genius, doctor, and more.
This moonlighter/part-timer element of the average IMF agent wasn’t really ported over into the films — in fact, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is so good at what he does and so committed to the work that, by Ghost Protocol, he’s resolved that it’s completely infeasible to maintain a marriage or personal life of any kind, even after M:i-III made Ethan’s stab at domesticity such a major narrative element. He’s pretty much just a covert operative at this point. That’s who he is. Not a family man, not an actor, not even a drug addict or a womanizer. Just all mission, all the time.
Ethan’s many teammates throughout the series are, ostensibly, the same way. To varying degrees, they each have specializations on the job, but the overwhelming impression is that, for each one, their life is the job. There is little mention, in any of the movies, of what anyone does when they aren’t on a mission. I mean, just take a look at the wiki page for Ethan’s best friend and “guy in the chair” (and the only other character who apears in every film), Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames):
Real “Donatello does machines” vibes.
Anyway, I’m just illustrating the point that the films, excepting the third, basically erase the original show’s concept of IMF agents having lives or careers outside of their field work.
And yet, as I watched the film, I was still reminded of the colorful team from the show in a way that I was not in any of the first three films. Though this IMF may be comprised of full-timers with no concern for work-life balance, the team established in Ghost Protocol is far more developed than any that came before. I couldn’t tell you the names of any of Ethan’s team members in the previous films without looking. (Does “Maggie Q” count?)
Ghost Protocol‘s new emphasis on Ethan’s cohorts and their split/shared responsibilities in the field make the film’s set pieces feel far more elaborate and gives the story a stronger emotional core. My mind goes to the sequence at the Burj Khalifa in Dubai—the climb and the subsequent staged meetings with terrorists.
In each scene, just about everything imaginable goes wrong. On the ascent up the tower, Ethan’s sticky gloves and laser glass cutter fail on him, forcing him to improvise the rest of his way up to the server room and his subsequent descent; meanwhile, back in the team’s hotel suite, the mask-maker fails, leaving Carter, Benji, and Brandt (Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, and Jeremy Renner) to operate on mere hope that the terrorists they’re staging meetings with don’t actually know what their respective associates look like.
It’s a riveting 15-or-so minutes smack in the middle of the film, and if you’re not on-board with the franchise after watching that, you probably never will be. I was.
Throughout the back-to-back sequence, Ethan, Carter, Benji, and Brandt each face a dozen of their own micro-conflicts that require improvisation and creative problem-solving, and we get to see each of them respond in their own ways. It’s a stark contrast to previous films, which essentially boil down to Ethan doing the bulk of the mission himself, either with his teammates on the perimeter, checking in via earpiece, or tagging along with him to provide support while he “does the thing.” Here, everyone gets something to do, and we get to spend detailed time watching them do it. It’s all the more exciting because, with the minute-by-minute ups and downs, it feels like any one of them could catastrophically fail at any moment.
Additionally, for once, you actually care if any of them fail because they’ve been onscreen long enough to become more than their assigned mission role. The fairer spread of focus across the whole team gives each member the time—even if it’s in small moments during an action sequence—to showcase their idiosyncrasies and the emotions driving their actions.
Credit is due in large part, on both spectacle and emotional fronts, to director Brad Bird, whom most would know for directing The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille. Despite (perhaps because of) his animation background, Bird makes a stunning leap into live-action with this film. Even when we’re bouncing between four or five characters, each of them navigating multiple locations and multitasking against ludicrous odds, the flow of the film never gets choppy. I have to imagine Bird’s experience working with visually clear and compelling storyboards for animation lent itself to smoothing out the elaborate, at-times convoluted storytelling that is inherent to M:I. Some pretty heavy-duty (and uncredited) script-polishing from #5-8 helmer Christopher McQuarrie certainly helped too.
Obviously, if you’ve seen any of the other three films Bird directed before Ghost Protocol, it’s no surprise that he has a handle on giving emotional depth to an ensemble. This film is probably weaker than his previous work in that regard, but it’s understandable given the load of plot and action it bears, and it’s still a better-than-average ensemble for a spy movie. Thankfully, this emphasis on the actions and emotions of Ethan’s colleagues continues for the rest of the series, even if not every agent in this film gets to. (Bring back Carter and Brandt, dammit! They deserve their “final reckoning” too!)
I may talk more about this come Fallout in a couple weeks, but another thing I love about this definitive shift to a team-oriented focus is that it actually enhances Ethan as a character too. Forcing him to share the screen with real, developed characters contrasts him with everyone else. This is the film where you start to see inklings of the vision of Ethan as this mythologized lunatic that everyone loves and reveres but also kind of stares at with concerned eyebrows all the time because he’s barely a real person anymore. He’s not quite there yet—indicated in the level of hesitation on his face as he swallows the prospect of climbing the world’s tallest building—but he later drives a car off a several-stories-high ledge and nosedives it into concrete, so… we’re getting there.
Bird’s kinetic, upbeat direction, combined with the decisive transition toward a stronger ensemble makes Ghost Protocol a really solid jumping-on point, and a defining film for the direction of the series. I love how serious and dramatic the later films get, but part of me longs for the high-wire levity that’s all over this film. Still, its legacy is felt in the emotional stakes of its successors. Turns out Tom Cruise isn’t the only reason to watch these movies.
Mission Accepted will return each Friday leading up to our review of The Final Reckoning.
Wishes he could forego sleep to watch more movies. Besides co-hosting Odd Trilogies and writing reviews, Andy builds Gundam models, loves on his three cats, and spends way too much time managing his Plex server. You can follow his movie-watching habits on Letterboxd.