Would you call yourself a King fan? Have you read a lot of his stuff?

No, actually I had only read Carrie, and then I've also read his semi-memoir book, On Writing.

Oh, man, that's such a good book.

Isn't it? I loved reading that. He's also just really an endearing person. Interesting, good, smart obviously, extremely talented... Have you read a lot of his books? Are you a Stephen King fan?

I guess so. I guess I've read maybe like a dozen or so, here and there?

A dozen or so's a lot.

He's had, like, nearly a hundred!

That's true. I haven't read much Stephen King, but since working on this project I've learned a lot about him and I think he's a really cool guy and I'll obviously read more.

How about the movies, then? Did you have the shit scared out of you by Carrie when you were little or anything like that?

I read the book and that actually scared the shit out of me more when I was in high school. I guess I wouldn't say I was scared by the movie, but titillated might be more the word. And Sissy Spacek, like you said, a legend, is one of my favorite actresses of all time and her performance in that movie is just so radical and weird and scary. Did you see the Brian De Palma documentary, De Palma? There's a part about casting her.

No, actually. I must.

There's some story, I forget the exact details, that they already had another choice for Carrie. Sissy Spacek knew De Palma through friends, and was like begging him, "You have to just see me for this part." And he was like, "Okay, sure." But it was some sort of courtesy. He already had cast the part in his mind, but then Sissy read and he was like, "Whelp! Never mind! Nobody else could ever play this part. Here you go."

I'm also a big fan of The Shining, the movie, even though we all know that Stephen King has said that he's not that big of a fan of that one... I loved the It adaptation that came out last year. I thought that the movie wasn't scary, but I'm excited that they're making the second half. The one I want to see right now is Pet Sematary.

Oh that's going to fuck you up. Are there any other King adaptations you'd want to do? It seems like the universe is open to cross-casting, with Skarsgård and Spacek involved in Castle Rock.

Actually, I read a pilot by his son, Joe Hill, that I loved. I love the idea of the book that they wrote together about women. Isn't it called Sleeping Beauties?

Wasn't that with Owen King, his other son?

I guess I'm interested in all the King men.

You used the phrase "final girl" earlier, and I'm wondering how you feel about the terms like "final girl" and "scream queen." A lot of people would describe you in films like Don't Breathe as that. Do you feel tropes, or even the phrasing like that, is dated? Or are you cool with it?

I have a lot of thoughts about it. I wouldn't really know if I could compile a perfect answer for that, but actually I do think that there is something very cool about the final girl. Of course, I think that women have been exploited and women's sexuality has been exploited in horror films since the beginning, and that's a lot of what horror films are about. There's a lot that you could point out in horror films that is misogynistic and totally just like, male fantasy violence against women.

But at the same time I think that horror films have given female characters a platform that normal mainstream movies haven't necessarily, in certain ways. I think that women can be action heroes in horror films in ways that are not common in action films. That's cool! And a lot of times women in horror are presented with their worst fear and they step up to the plate.

So, I kind of like the term! I think that there's something, I don't know, culty and old school about it. I don't feel it's disrespectful. Horror fans show up for you. It's been kind of flattering in a funny way to have these strangers consider me, that I'm accepted into this world. It's so not what I expected out of my life, but I feel like I have this badge of honor.

Kline worked on several films with Richard Fleischer, beginning with The Boston Strangler (1968), which became influential for its use of split-screen. Kline worked with Fleischer on four more films: Soylent Green (1973), The Don Is Dead (1973), Mr. Majestyk (1974) and Mandingo (1975).

Kline was nominated for a second Oscar for his work on the 1976 remake of King Kong. Other credits (among many) include Karel Reisz' Who'll Stop the Rain (1978), Jim McBride's remake of Breathless (1983), Robert Wise's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat.

Kline chose Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist to show to the crew of Body Heat. (Kasdan had asked everyone to choose one film to screen, in order to establish common ground among the crew.)

"I believe in variety," Kline once explained to students at the American Film Institute. "I think there are some brilliantly photographed films, but there’s a sameness. Each scene may be a work of art, but you start seeing it repeated over and over and over again. I find that Bertolucci is a master at variation, a variety of looks within a single film. I try to do that in my work as well."

In 2013, Kline rewatched The Fury in preparation for a Film Factory interview, which was used as a supplement on several European DVD/Blu-ray editions of the film. Here's a brief excerpt from that interview:

This is the only time that I've worked with Brian De Palma, and it was a great pleasure, I must say. And we started filming in Chicago, which is a great visual city. It's a unique city. And we have a variety of looks.

The Fury, to me, looking back now 35 years, whatever it was, in re-running it to prepare for this interview, I’m going to put it at probably one of the best pictures I’ve ever made, technically—you’re never aware of the technique. With the reality, the freshness of it. Seeing it again, it reminded me of how good it is. It really… De Palma did a terrific job of directing it, without a doubt.

When I was first asked to do the film, I was in Mexico doing a film with a very fine director, also-- Karel Reisz-- and my agent called me to tell me that Brian De Palma would like me to do a film with him when I complete the film I was doing in Mexico. And I asked Karel Reisz, I said, I don't know De Palma, I know of him, what do you think? 'He's a very talented director,' he said, 'take it, take it, take it.' And that came from, I think, one of the most gifted directors ever. And a wonderful person.

So I arrived maybe a month later, when I finished the picture in Mexico, and met De Palma in his office. And every wall was loaded with the sketches-- his... like a comic book, in a way, he would do it. He had pre-designed the whole picture. And I said, well, this is going to be a breeze, you've got everything lined up. And he said, 'Oh, yeah." Anyway, I was impressed with him. And then when we started the picture, he would say, 'Here's the shot." Well, it was easy to do with the camera, you know, we would put the camera in the position that would capture the sketch, and I would light it.

And I said, 'Something is bothering me here.' And I brought Brian to the side, and I said, 'Brian, you're not rehearsing anything before we film.' And it's a way of working-- I haven't worked this way before. I've always found something interesting comes from a rehearsal. And, it either comes from the actor, it comes from seeing the actors doing it, that you see-- things happen that you just can't put on paper all the time. Because first of all, the script-- I was working from a script that was all white pages. As we're filming, there's adjustments made in the script. Dialogue, whatever it is, a lot of things. And the pages come in different colors-- they start with blue, and then yellow, then gold and whatnot. I said, 'I've never worked on a picture that had all white pages.'

And he listened and everything, he was attentive. And I talked him into rehearsing. And he bought it. And he found value in rehearsing that deviated from the sketches. And I think after a week, we didn't see the sketches anymore. He was at rehearsal, we would... I do it with almost every director who doesn't want to work that way, talk them into it-- I've been very lucky that way. We would have the crew doing the scene, during the development of the scene, we'd get everybody off the set, and we'd have coffee, read the paper, whatever it was, so no interruptions or disturbances, so the actors can be themselves and not worry about somebody watching them. And he found that to be very valuable. And we did get very good things, and that's the way we operated.

But he would sit there-- he was... Brian would be, while I'm lighting and whatever, my part, he would sit there, thinking things, always deep in thought. And I respected that of him, I only consulted him when I had to, and, you know, give an opinion, whatever, or we'd joke about something, whatever.

Jerry G. then introduces Loren Smith, a Northwestern University Law School Graduate (who would go on in later years to become a federal judge). Jerry G. reads a quote from Smith that states his position on the Vietnam war: "A hawk: a not-totally extinct bird." Graham tells Jerry G. that he is not by nature a political person. Even so, later on in the segment, Graham cannot help but passionately speak up when Smith states that "part of the solution has to be to tell the communist world that we will use force to gain political objectives"...

Gerrit Graham: Now you see, that's just where I disagree, and I just don't buy it. I don't suppose there's any political rhyme or reason to it-- as a matter of fact, I'm sure there isn't. But it just seems to me that the United States has taken upon itself an obligation which most of the world's peoples would just as soon they hadn't taken upon themselves. And I just... there doesn't seem, to me, to be any need for the United States to impose its political ethos on a country which up to that point was not a capitalist bastion.

Loren: What?

Gerrit: Which is what they're trying to make it into.

Loren: I don't think we're trying to do that...

Sean Fennessey, The Ringer
Mission: Impossible Is the Best Movie Franchise—Here’s Why

[Ranking out of the six films]
1. Mission: Impossible (1996)

Directed by Brian De Palma

The Lesson: Franchise Isn’t a Dirty Word

While Brian De Palma watched his pals George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola build franchise empires and scale the movie business to the height of their imagination, the Movie Brats’ fourth compadre worked in a cocoon. His films in the ’70s and ’80s were brash, often violent, sexualized thrillers indebted to Alfred Hitchcock. They were elegantly composed and bracing works that sometimes struggled to exceed their own commitment to the ecstatic. But decades after Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and The Godfather, De Palma finally took a studio gig with Mission: Impossible and became a part of a template that is being copied to this day. It’s his movie, through and through. And it vanishes from his hands the minute it ends. In the Mission: Impossible parlance, he accepted the mission, and then it self-destructed.

2. Langley heist, Mission: Impossible
“Relax, Luther,” Ethan says with a smile. “It’s much worse than you think.” And indeed it is — getting to the file they need from CIA headquarters requires voice ID, changing numerical codes, double electronic key card, and a retinal scan, all to get into a secure room with heightened sound and temperature sensitivity. And so Hunt is lowered in, by rope from an air duct (an homage to the classic ‘60s heist picture Topkapi), in what’s really the opposite of what we think of an “action sequence”: there’s no gunplay, no explosions, no fisticuffs, and no pounding score to juice up the excitement. (The closing action sequence, which falls into those a parameters, is a dud — and, criminal considering the eventual direction of the franchise, it looks laughably fake.) In fact, director Brian De Palma’s decision to play the sequence in total silence makes it more involving for the viewer; it’s so quiet, and the stakes are so high, the audience is afraid to make a sound either. De Palma, playing his audience like a piano (as his hero Alfred Hitchcock used to say), stretches the suspense as far as he can, snaking in to tight close-ups of Hunt’s rope, Jean Reno’s hands, that single bead of sweat — and then the rat shows up.

I hadn’t revisited the first three in over a decade, and they’re a fascinating trio of movies in no small part because of who made them. One of the elements that has really separated the “M:I” films from other action franchises (or even most of the MCU) is the willingness of Tom Cruise and company to turn the storytelling over to known auteurs. We live in an era in which most franchises work to flatten the authorship of their director (again, looking at you MCU), but each “M:I” is unmistakably the product of its creator. There are touches in each of the first three films that echo themes of the other works of Brian De Palma, John Woo, and J.J. Abrams. The next three get away from this aspect a bit and feel more consistent with one another, but it’s fascinating to watch a major Hollywood franchise that allowed viewers to see the director’s fingerprints instead of just waxing them out.

Having said that, the two newest films are the kind of technical marvels that really amplify the art of 4K most of all. To be fair, the first movie has never looked or sounded this good, and I had forgotten how beautifully-constructed it is from first scene to last. If you haven’t seen it in a long time, you should catch up on 4K. “Mission: Impossible 2” has not held up quite as well—it’s startling to see how much Hunt changed as a character/hero from De Palma to Woo—but it’s still an interesting film, anchored by solid supporting turns from Thandie Newton and Sir Anthony Hopkins. “Mission: Impossible 3” is often held up as a high point because it has the best villain and the highest emotional stakes. Both are true (at least until “Fallout”), but it already feels a little dated.

In the Eighties going into the Nineties, spurned on by the success of the “Star Trek” movies, making big screen versions out of familiar small screen titles suddenly became the rage for a while. With its well-known title and memorable theme music, Paramount Pictures was keen to make a “Mission: Impossible” film but the project remained in limbo until Tom Cruise, at the very apex of his stardom, decided not only to do it but to make it the first effort from his newly-formed production company. Sydney Pollack was attached to the project for a while but eventually it went to Brian De Palma—the notion of the generally iconoclastic filmmaker doing a potential tentpole project of this sort must have seemed strange at the time but his last major box-office success had been an adaptation of another television show, “The Untouchables” (1987). A number of top writers, including Robert Towne, Steve Zaillian and David Koepp, worked on the script but it reportedly went into production without a completed screenplay. There were also rumors of friction during the shoot between Cruise and De Palma that appeared to be tacitly confirmed when De Palma dropped out of the film’s press junket on the eve of its opening.

When audiences first sat down to watch “Mission: Impossible” in May 1996, those with an actual working knowledge of the series must have felt right at home. From the start, the film trotted out the most familiar ingredients—the theme, the opening credits featuring a rapid-fire assortment of clips from the story we were about to see and, most of all, an IMF team once again led by veteran Jim Phelps (now played by Jon Voight) and including his wife, Claire (Emmanuelle Beart), and various experts in their respective fields (played by such familiar faces as Kristin Scott Thomas and Emilio Estevez). Most importantly, there was point man Ethan Hunt (Cruise) choosing to accept a mission in Prague to recover a top secret list of CIA agents from the American Embassy that requires clever moves, hi-tech gadgetry and, of course, an elaborate disguise or two. Then, in classic De Palma fashion, things quickly go sideways and the once-cocky Ethan is left standing helpless as the rest of his team is killed off one by one and the list vanishes. To make matters worse, when Hunt reports to his superior (Henry Czerny) for debriefing, he learns that the entire mission was a ruse designed to ferret out a mole who was intending on stealing and selling the list to a secretive arms dealer known only as Max—since he was the only survivor, the assumption is that Ethan was the guilty party. He escapes easily enough and, after putting together an ad-hoc team consisting of a couple of disgraced former IMF operatives, computer genius Luther Stickey (Ving Rhames) and pilot Franz Krieger (Jean Reno), and Claire, who survived the attack after all, creates an elaborate plan to steal the real list himself in order to lure the person who framed him while at the same time escaping the pursuit of his former employers.

The film got reviews that were decent but hardly spectacular with many of them complaining that the storyline was too convoluted for its own good. Therefore, it may come as a shock to people revisiting it for the first time in a while (or those who have never seen it before) to discover just how strong it really is. Yes, the systematic destruction of the IMF team in the opening scenes, coupled with the later revelation that—Spoiler Alert!—it was Phelps himself who was the mole, shocked and outraged fans of the original show (not to mention some of the original stars, who gave interviews to show their displeasure with the film). And yet, this move proved to be as dramatically clever as it was audacious. The times had changed considerably in the years since the original series went off the air and the notion of a clandestine spy agency going on officially unsanctioned missions to mess around in other countries was simply not going to play in the same fashion. By blowing things up in this way, the film managed to clear the decks for a “Mission: Impossible” designed for the current world while managing to throw most moviegoers for a loop early on in the proceedings.

It is funny to note that this film was once derided for its alleged incoherence because the narrative seems remarkably clean and efficiently told, especially in comparison to what passes for blockbuster filmmaking these days. When it is seen a second time—and this is the rare modern screen spectacular that actually plays better on repeat viewings—one can more clearly see just how smartly written it really is. (I especially love the scene in which Ethan and Phelps reunite and catch each other up on what is happening and Ethan quietly realizing that he is being lied to by his former mentor.) The performances are also quite good as well, which also comes as a surprise since quality acting is not usually the highest priority in films like this. Cruise does an excellent job of playing against his generally cocksure screen persona, Voight adds weight and even a slight degree of poignance to his turn as Phelps and as the mysterious Max, Vanessa Redgrave turns up in a couple of scenes and pretty much steals the show—when she and Cruise have their big scene together, the screen crackles with so much electricity that one wishes that someone could have found a project that would have given them more chances to play off of each other. (The only sort-of disappointment in the cast is Beart, who is nowhere near as electrifying here as she was in films like “Manon of the Spring” or “La Belle Noisseuse” [1991], though that might have something to do with the last-minute deletion of scenes suggest a love triangle between Claire, her husband and Ethan.)

The best thing about “Mission: Impossible”—not to mention one of the key elements that would go on to drive the subsequent films—is the way that a film that was presumably launched primarily as a star project managed to morph, with the approval of the star/producer, into perhaps the most auteur-friendly franchise in operation today. Since it is a film where he was hired to interpret someone else’s material, this is clearly not a “pure” Brian De Palma movie in the manner of such self-generated projects as “Dressed to Kill” (1980), “Blow Out” (1981) or “Femme Fatale” (2002). However, this is one of his most successful attempts at channeling his own particular obsessions into a more overtly commercial framework than is usually found in his more personal efforts. Although not necessarily the kind of story that he might have designed wholly on his own, this story allowed De Palma to tackle subject matter that has long fascinated him, such as voyeurism, technology, mistrust of the very organizations that are supposedly there to protect us and stories that feature unreliable narrators. The film also allows him to demonstrate once again that he is one of the great visual storytellers of our time and includes some of the most memorable extended set pieces of his career. Under normal circumstances, either the opening sabotage in Prague or the climactic fight aboard and on top of a train speeding through the Chunnel would be duly enshrined as the absolute peak moments in the career of an ordinary filmmaker. With De Palma, they aren’t even the high point of the film thanks to the masterful sequence depicting Ethan and his team infiltrating CIA headquarters to steal the list of spies from a room rigged to sound off alarms at even the slightest hint of an intruder in the room—even a simple drop of sweat could do the trick. The entire sequence is a breathtaking wonder that is pretty much a master class in filmmaking all by itself.

Petra Collins: What is your current obsession or ‘fetish’?

Selena Gomez: Right now, I have a fetish for Brian De Palma films. The way he shoots women is so sexy. I’m printing out pictures to hang up in my new house right now. Melanie Griffith in Body Double. So sexy.

Petra Collins: Oh my God. Brian De Palma. I love him. I’m with you on that one, that’s my fetish right now too.

The audience saw a clip from the show, which details a social worker’s efforts to help soldiers returning from war (though perhaps, it seems, to nefarious corporate ends). In one continuous take, the scene shows Roberts taking a phone call at her desk, standing up and walking down stairs and through a densely populated office. In a fluid tracking shot, the camera follows her both from afar and overhead, passing over the walls dividing each room. Such explicitly cinematic flourishes, Esmail said, were inspired by films by Hitchcock and Brian De Palma.

Esmail said the cinematography and atmosphere of paranoia borrows from Mr. Robot. Like that show, he said, Homecoming taps into a seemingly bottomless well of feeling about the current era of “corporate greed,” as he put it. “We’re still reeling” from the 2008 financial crisis, he said, notably from the fact that no financial executives wound up criminally prosecuted for the meltdown. “I don’t want to say all corporations are the villains but there is that un-trustworthiness,” he said.

Jacob Knight, /Film
How Brian De Palma Subverted the Blockbuster With ‘Mission: Impossible’

A Different Kind of Blockbuster

If you hire Brian De Palma to helm your nearly $100 million blockbuster (whose budget seems unusually small come 2018), chances are it isn’t going resemble anything else hitting multiplexes that (or any other) year. This is precisely what happened when Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner brought the notorious Hitchcock conversationalist aboard for Mission: Impossible. It obviously wasn’t the first time De Palma had manned a massive studio picture – as he’d already churned out the ultraviolent gangster remake Scarface in ’83, its massive, David Mamet-penned period successor The Untouchables in ’87, and the infamous bomb Bonfire of the Vanities in ’90. However, his signing signaled the direction Cruise was headed with his own 007 companion piece: it was going to be an eccentric series, led by bona fide auteurs as opposed to anonymous journeying workmen.

With that in mind, it’s no wonder Mission: Impossible is possibly one of the most subversive, stylistically defined franchise entries – let alone inceptors – in cinema history. Cruise’s first outing as Impossible Mission Force Agent Ethan Hunt is just as much a showcase for De Palma’s peculiar fascinations as it is the front man’s considerable star power. Looking back on the third-highest grossing picture of ’96 twenty-two years on is a beguiling investigation of how both the series and studio filmmaking on the whole have radically evolved; notions of “shared universes” a mere glimmer in some future executive’s eye. In fact, it’s tough to watch M:I and imagine that anyone involved (beyond Cruise, of course) expected it to stretch into a decades-spanning action/adventure serial.

That De Palma Touch

De Palma has always been a pop dissident. From his earliest days helming Godardian farces such as Greetings (’68) and Hi, Mom! (’70), there’s been an air of angry rebellion contained in even his funniest work (just look at the harrowing Be Black Baby sequence from the latter for the best example). Phantom of the Paradise (’74) doubles as the director’s commentary on how commercialization can bastardize great art (having been inspired by hearing a Muzak cover of the Beatles in an elevator), and Carrie (’76) is just as much a scathing indictment of every popular high school kid – who this self-described “science dork” was the antithesis of at the same age – as it is a rip-roaring psychedelic horror show. Even his dizzying erotic thriller – the perverted, porno chic nightmare Body Double (’84) – is a knowing middle finger to the criticisms he received for his previous Hitch riffs, its title derived from the jabs taken at the stylist for using a stand-in during Angie Dickinson’s Dressed to Kill (’80) nude scenes. In short, De Palma is an artist often fueled by “fuck you”, willing to antagonize his detractors by doing whatever the hell he wants.

However, if there’s any entry in BDP’s filmography that his Mission: Impossible shares the most in common with, it’s the paranoid conspiracy thriller Blow Out (’81). In that near inscrutable masterpiece, B-Movie sound man Jack Terry (John Travolta) accidentally captures a Senatorial assassination while recording new foley effects for his latest body count picture. Using the tools of the cinematic trade, Terry reconstructs the murder into a moving image, all while an unhinged government operative (a lecherous John Lithgow) pursues him and the only other surviving witness to the crime: a lovable floozy name Sally (De Palma’s then wife Nancy Allen). Blow Out is a motion picture awash in both distrust of authority and its author’s punch-drunk love of cinema, as he utilizes all the tricks in his deep magician’s bag to craft one of our finest motion pictures.

With Mission: Impossible, De Palma essentially becomes Jack Terry, disassembling the elements that made Bruce Geller’s prime time pulp a cultural touchstone and then rebuilding them in his own image*. Hunt’s initial mission – which we bear witness to through a series of the director’s trademark Steadicam POV shots – is quickly dismantled by an unseen killer (via a rather grisly upending of expectations), placing the baby-faced operative on the run while higher ups like IMF Director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) treat him like Public Enemy No. 1 (their initial tense, post-op meeting a barrage of split-diopter shots scored by Danny Elfman’s rising strings).

At no time does Mission: Impossible care if you’re confused. Why would Ethan risk the identities of hundreds of agents just to save himself? When does Kittridge start to trust Ethan again? What if Jean Reno’s Franz Krieger doesn’t buy Ethan’s little magic show and doesn’t throw his (real NOC list) disc in the trash? Yep, it doesn’t care. It just keeps going. And for all the stunts Tom Cruise does in the later films (which, to be clear, are insanely fun to watch), nothing can beat the tension of Cruise hanging an inch above a weight sensitive floor at CIA headquarters. (Again this scene is awesome. Does it make any real sense why they are there or why that room would exist? No, but holy crap it’s a great scene. Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the scene where Ethan tells Kittridge, “You’ve never seen me very upset,” then throws the explosive gum at the aquarium. This scene is gorgeous.)

Also, the craziest thing is just the fact that Brian De Palma directed this movie. Yes, De Palma has directed some movies before that could qualify as “action,” like The Untouchables and maybe even Scarface, but Mission: Impossible is his only true “big blockbuster type movie” (as we define it today) and, not surprisingly, by far his highest grossing movie.

De Palma’s direction on Mission:Impossible maintains great atmospherics and sense of paranoia. There are close-ups of blood being washed off hands or staying on a floppy disk: touching on the horror genre, without ever going TOO far into the gratuitous or adult. Indeed, there is an almost child-like innocence and curiosity about the film; perhaps in line with Cruise’s own (then) younger worldview? Upbeat tone and pace, despite the nominally shocking premise for the hero.

 

DePalma does channel Hitchcock here whilst making it his own. Notice that for all the consequence free escapism, this IS a film with real stakes. If Ethan Hunt is captured? He is dead and disgraced. Career. Reputation. Family. Mortality. ALL on the table. So his gamble with stealing secret information from his own side / Faustian pacts, a necessary step that sets up the film without too much contrivance, despite criticisms to the contrary. Plot is clearer and simpler than many believe. Indeed, I’d cite it as essential script study for all film writers in waiting. Every scene has something to say in a meta way about cinema, whilst existing as a self contained thriller and never breaking the 4th wall.

Some fantastic and distinctive set pieces: the Prague chase; Restaurant explosion; the CIA Heist (Kubrick meets Star Wars); the Train. Great use of sound design and editing, throughout.

And Waterloo Station (also seen in future years in franchises: Bourne Ultimatum and Mission Impossibles’ own Rogue Nation) a character in itself:.

Tom Cruise, as always, in love with London. They should give him an honorary knighthood for his services. He is second only to Richard Curtis and the rom-com brigade for the visual odes to our Brits’ beloved capital.

There are thematic layers hidden away like data in a secret vault but DePalma manages to sneak in some hints (foreshadowing fates in a brutal opening; a love triangle between the Voight /Cruise/Beart characters in the past?). And for all its high class and money glossy escapism (TGV first class, naturally!), there ARE references, albeit briefly, to dying parents, bankruptcy and a military intelligence establishment that has lost its way post Cold War yet pre 9/11. The film is set in that mid 90s, Clinton/Blair third way era calm before the storm.

Speaking of transitions and styles of leader? One could argue that the rumoured creative clashes between Cruise and DePalma actually brought out the A + Game in BOTH parties. The conflicting agendas fused in such a way that the film’s own clash of genres and tones and purposes, as well as its own, inner motif of two military intel teams competing against each other..just..works. Against the odds, backs to wall = mission, accomplished?

It is apt that the mentors here are also villains; yet thereby bring out the best in the heroes. Much needed, because Cruise’s ‘Ethan Hunt’ is simply a device, an avatar, for this series to progress. Even the name sounds like they just picked it at random. Why not just call Cruise’s character ‘Jim Phelps’ from the tv series counterpart and call the thing a reboot? Or better still: Tom Cruise is…Tom Cruise?! Yes he can act and should have Oscars to that effect (American Made: HELLO? You. woz. ROBBED!). But here? It’s HIM. Still is, in the franchise years later. Just call it out. 😉 But they had their reasons and it stands on its own terms, despite intersection / overlap with some other (then) in vogue franchise properties /aesthetics.

Before internet cat videos, before flip phones, before Beyoncé could talk–let alone sing–there was Tom Cruise. A nuclear blast might kill him, but don’t be so sure. He’s as enduring as the pyramids, if not nearly as impressive. Yet even people who don’t care for Cruise often have a weakness for the Mission: Impossible movies, and that’s as it should be. Their outlandish plots and over-the-cliff stunts are the most suitable delivery systems for his energy and undimmable wattage: he just makes sense in them.

Mission: Impossible—Fallout may be the best Mission: Impossible movie since the first, made in the dawn of the cat-Internet age, 1996, by Brian De Palma. Or perhaps it’s just the one with the mostest: even by the franchise’s extravagant standards, Fallout throws off Hope-diamond levels of grandeur.