Now let's bounce back up to the first two paragraphs of Durr's review:

The Mission: Impossible intellectual property has existed for the better part of 50 years dating back to the original 1966 American espionage television series. A procession of films starting with Brian De Palma's 1996 delineation of the source material enkindled a strong following of action thrill-ride enthusiasts, each awaiting the latest death-defying feat from the ageless wonder himself, Tom Cruise. With each subsequent film, the series has shifted away from De Palma's trademarked directorial techniques such as point-of-view perspectives, split-diopter shots, and cross-cutting to manufacture enough rising tension in the edit. The core fundamentals of the spy espionage sub-genre have largely taken a backseat since then, instead relying on spectacle as the main selling point. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One comes full circle with the series' roots, however, recapturing that classic De Palma tension while upping the ante with a few truly inspiring action set pieces.

Atoning for the failures of the past and reconciling with the repercussions are the central themes of this newest rendition. As the film's cinematic qualities are heavily influenced by the past, so is the narrative, attempting to interweave pieces of Ethan Hunt's tempestuous history with a threat that portends the well-being of his fellow Impossible Mission Force crewmates. Dead Reckoning also feels timely, centering the film around a sentient artificial intelligence whose ability to infiltrate secure databases and control information spawns a global race for control. Artificial intelligence, the ability to process human intelligence through technology, has dictated the conversation as we implement various AI-generated applications into our daily lives. As advancements in computer sciences grow, artificial neural networks augment in complexities, making artificial intelligence a useful, but dangerous tool.

JC Calciano (Production Associate to Paula Wagner):

Honestly, I don't think anyone knows this. I think that five of us who were in this meeting ... I truly don't think anyone else outside of this meeting even knows this. When we were writing the script, we brought in a friend of mine. I had produced a movie in Arizona, and I met this woman who was a CIA agent. She and her husband were both CIA agents. So I brought her in as a consultant to help with the movie. Her name is Sue Doucette, and she came to London to help us as a consultant.

When we were working on the script and talking about the script, she told us that — and this is true — the CIA had a room that was ... I think there was a name for it, but I don't remember. There was no outside connections into this room. So this way, nobody could get to it. This particular room was the most secure room at the CIA. The only way you can get in is by one door with one agent. We wrote this scene based on her notes and experiences on that. She was so great, and she was so helpful. We hired her to be the actress who stands guard at the door for that scene.

The idea was to keep it as quiet as possible. This is an incredibly difficult chore for the sound editors, who can't stand silence — it just drives them crazy. And there was a closeup of the rope going over a little wheel, and they put in a tiny little squeak, and we had to say, "No, take it out, take it out. They wouldn't go in there with a squeaky wheel. This is 'Mission: Impossible!' They get it right." So we tried taking everything away, and that just didn't quite work. So there's a little bit of air going on.

As a director, Brian De Palma was really great at creating tension and suspense, because it's all about the setup, and he was masterful at setting up the task and then creating obstacle after obstacle. So the threat had to be taken out of commission. I mean, this is beautiful teamwork on the part of Tom's team. This had to be so carefully orchestrated, so at the right moment, at the exact time, with the right dose, [Claire] had to put the drop in his coffee.

Rolf Saxon:

I was on it for, I think, two weeks, and I was working on [another] picture interspersed with that. I was being taken from one set to the other set, so I worked three weeks solid without a day off. That was great. Not complaining. I loved it. It was fun. But I got a little punch-drunk every once in a while, and I was messing around on set, joking around. The first [assistant director], Chris Soldo, came over and said, "Brian wants to have a word with you." And the look on his face was not good. I thought, "Oh jeez, here we go." [Brian] asked me to come over, I came over, and he said, "You're something of a clown, aren't you? A bit of a clown." Chris had said, "Look at me, and if I shake my head no, don't answer." He was standing behind Brian, and Chris and Brian had worked together for 10 years. Chris is a great guy. We're still friends.

So basically, there was a little bit of back and forth, and [Brian] said, "Can you do that again?" And I said, "I beg your pardon?" And he said, "Can you do that again? Make people laugh like that? Everybody was laughing, and I'd like to put that in the show." And I said, "Yeah, sure!" He said, "OK, after lunch, we'll spend a couple hours and put some funny stuff in." So after lunch, we spent all that afternoon and part of the next morning putting in a bunch of stuff, almost none of it which is still there. But the throwing up is. He said, "Do you want noise to happen?" Brian asked if I wanted noise in the bucket. I said, "No, I think they'll get the idea. My thinking is we don't want to gross people out, we want it to be sort of amusing." And he said, "OK, cool. Fine. Fine. That's great. Good idea," as he turned away.

The closeup of the catching of the drop, that was done by a second unit. Brian's protege, second unit director Eric Schwab, who did all of the plate photography in Ireland for the train sequence. That was one of the shots that was handed off to him.

Catching the drop of sweat from the glasses, that was fun. I got to do that. That's actually my hand in there. But this camera was shooting 360 frames per second and it makes so much noise. I mean, I think you get one take for a roll of film on that because it's just going through so fast. I know I wasn't hanging in wires when we did the actual high-speed camera and the sweat dropping because it was such a closeup on the drop of sweat coming down and the hand coming in to catch it.

In Donloe's final scene, there was a particular gentleman who said, "And what about him?" and at one point, he ad-libbed, "And what about the geek?" and De Palma cut filming and said, "What did you say?" He said, "What about the geek?" and [De Palma] said, "Don't call Rolf a geek." I think that was the nicest thing he'd ever done to me in the entire two or three weeks. That was just really nice of him to do that.

JC Calciano: Princess Diana came to set one day. So that's how much [attention] we were getting, because Tom was there. It was a funny story that I get a phone call. Now, I'll tell the story. It doesn't put me in the best light, because I was a 30-year-old, 30, maybe, young guy, American, not really savvy to the royals or any of the English stuff. But I get a phone call that said, "Princess Diana would like to come to the set. Can she have a tour?" So I'm like, "It's your country. Sure. She wants to come." So she showed up, and she just rolled in. She didn't have anyone other than Harry and William with her. She just rolled in, and one of the production staff comes in into my office, ashen. They're like, "Princess Diana is in the production office, asking for you." Nobody knew, and I didn't think to tell them. So she came in, and I was like, "Oh, all right. I'll be right there."

Anyway, so then she came in, and she was lovely. I showed her around the whole location and stuff, and she's like, "Oh, can I meet Tom Cruise?" I was like, "Yeah, let me tell him you're here," which I hadn't even thought before, like, "Oh, let me prepare anyone for her." So she came, and then it's like, "Tom, could you see Princess Diana?" He's like, "Of course. Of course. Set it up. Set it up." I'm like, "No, no, no. She's right here." He goes, "She's here with you?" I was like, "Yeah, I'm showing her around." [He was] like, "No, no, God. Come in. Come in. Come in." It was just funny how casual it was.

Keith Campbell: Everybody says, "Hey, tell us the story about your career and stuff," and [this] is the best story of my entire career. Because I was in there rehearsing, hanging upside down, coming down from the ceiling, and the door of that set opens up and in walk Tom Cruise and Princess Diana and William and Harry. They came to visit the set and that's where I got to meet them. It was just unbelievable. I was hanging upside down and Tom introduced me to Princess Diana and the boys while I was hanging upside down and she reached up and shook my hand. It was so sweet.

Here's an excerpt:

For all of Cruise’s stomach-lurching stunt work in M:I sequels – including the latest, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning – the CIA heist is still the series’ most enduring moment. It’s also the truest to the 1966-1973 TV series: a seemingly impossible mission, pulled off via intricate planning, crafty deceptions, and teamwork.

It’s stunning craftsmanship from Brian De Palma – a true master of suspense, demonstrating the same precision-perfect execution as the Impossible Missions Force. The tension De Palma squeezes from a single bead of sweat is incredible.

Cruise did the stunt work, naturally, beginning a trend that has intensified across the sequels. Dangling upside down for a few hours seems like small potatoes compared to clinging onto a plane during take-off. But it was punishingly hard to do. Attempting to hang parallel to the floor, Cruise kept tipping forward and bashing his face – so he stuck £1 coins in his boots to balance himself out horizontally.

It was De Palma who came up with the sequence, inspired by a similar set-piece in the 1964 heist movie, Topkapi. De Palma filmed the heist in near-silence – another nod to Topkapi, and a deliberate reaction against the sheer racket of other blockbusters. “All the action films coming out were so noisy!” says [Paula] Wagner. “What could be done that was different? Silence. You couldn’t have a sound in that sequence. Nothing could disrupt the flow and ambiance in that room. That was unique unto itself – the concept of silence.”

Indeed, the 1996 Mission: Impossible was a different kind of blockbuster – a complex thriller with perspective-shifting rug-pulls – and markedly different from what the series is now. Not that modern M:I isn’t good stuff. It’s the most consistent and wildly inventive action series around. But even Dead Reckoning – out now – has tipped its hat and rubber mask to the first movie.

Mission: Impossible was the first film that Tom Cruise produced himself. It was also his idea. “The conversation I remember most clearly was Tom calling me and saying, ‘We’re going to do Mission: Impossible – I love the series!’” says Paula Wagner. “And I loved it too.” Cruise and Wagner would also produce Mission: Impossibles 2 and 3 together. More recently, Wagner produced the Pretty Woman musical – on tour across the UK later this year.

Back in the 1990s, there was a Hollywood gold rush on old school TV properties. Between 1993 and 1999, there were also film versions of The Fugitive, Maverick, The Saint, The Avengers, and Wild Wild West. It preempted the current blockbuster formula. Almost 30 years on, every blockbuster is essentially a re-run. “This was early in taking a TV show and making it a movie,” says Wagner. “Now it’s done all the time. And this was before all the Marvel franchises. I think we were pioneers out there working out ‘What is this? How does this work as a movie? What are the elements that you keep? What are the things that you change and evolve?’ It was more than making a movie. It was bigger than that.”

But unlike The Fugitive et al, Mission: Impossible hadn’t been off screens all that long. Paramount had made attempts at an M:I film in the 1980s and brought back the TV show in 1988, with original series star Peter Graves. When Tom Cruise whipped off the rubber mask for the first time, M:I had only been off air for six years.

...

One of the major challenges, says Wagner, was “How do you reinvent a Cold War television series for a film in the mid-1990s?” Critics asked the same thing ahead of the film’s release. The original IMF team operated in the shadows of the Cold War. Regular targets included dictators and shady governments in made-up countries. Jon Voight’s IMF leader, Jim Phelps – the character played by Peter Graves on TV – comments on his place post-Cold War. “One day you wake up and the president of the United States is running the country without your permission. The son of a b––––, how dare he.” Phelps admits that he’s now just “an obsolete piece of hardware not worth upgrading.” GoldenEye, released just six months earlier, had similarly repositioned Bond for the 1990s – “a relic of the Cold War”.

Other changes were needed. The TV series had been about a team operation, with Phelps selecting his preferred agents at the start of each episode – each of whom had their own special skills to carry out their part of the mission. De Palma was not only subverting the conventions, he had to make M:I a star vehicle for Cruise, too. “The first thing we have to do is kill off the whole team,” said De Palma.

The film begins like the classic episodes: Phelps receives his mission (which he naturally chooses to accept) via a self-destructing tape, then assembles his team and plans out the mission. They have to seize a list of CIA agents from a target in Prague. But it’s a set-up. The team – including Emilio Estevez and Kristin Scott Thomas – are murdered one by one. Its rich De Palmian stuff: a dizzying swirl of trickery and kills, and shrouded in a thick fog of treachery. “You set the rules up and turn them on their head,” says Wagner. “You think you have your mission team, then they all die in the beginning! Just when you think it’s gonna turn out a certain way, it doesn’t.”

...

The 1996 action now seems relatively low-key – in contrast to Cruise trotting around the Burj Khalifa at 2,700ft, at least ­– though the film still hangs on three stunt sequences: the CIA HQ heist, a fight on a high-speed train, and Cruise jumping away from an exploding aquarium – a neat, watery twist on the standard jumping-away-from-an-explosion set-piece. Cruise performed the stunt himself, leaping away from literally tons of water, which required precision timing.

But Mission: Impossible is an unusually smart action film. In the later sequels, the trademark deceptions and confidence tricks are played like set pieces – usually punctuated by a punch-the-air mask rip. In the first Mission: Impossible, the deceptions are the fabric of the whole film. It wrong-foots viewers at almost every turn – a constant unraveling of misdirections, springing one reveal after another.

The labyrinthine plot wasn’t for everyone. After the film’s release, De Palma called Koepp and told him there was a one-word buzz about it: “Incomprehensible!”

In its smartest scene, Voight’s back-from-the-dead Phelps tries to sucker Hunt with an elaborate lie about how the botched Prague mission played out. Phelps narrates his version of events, but what we see is something completely different – Hunt figuring out what really happened. He knows that Phelps masterminded the double-cross. “If you look at De Palma films, his characters aren’t quite what you think they are – often appearances belie who the characters really are,” says Wagner about that sequence. “That was another aspect that Tom and I as producers really appreciated and supported. Not only the sleight of hand in terms of the action, but none of the characters were exactly who you thought they were.”

The film abandons the smarts for the final showdown. Phelps and Hunt fight across a train as it races through the Channel Tunnel – while Jean Reno gives chase in a helicopter. The new M:I film, Dead Reckoning, also stages a train fight – one of the seven-quel’s numerous nods to the first movie.

The original train showdown is still a thumping bit of action. It somehow puts you right onto the carriages – the feeling that you’re holding on for dear life just by watching it. When the classic Lalo Schifrin theme kicks in, and the helicopter rotor blade misses Cruise’s throat by a matter of inches, it’s undeniably thrilling.

Cruise and De Palma debated about whether to include the train-helicopter sequence. Cruise and Robert Towne, said De Palma, were pushing for the film to end with a mask reveal in the boxcar. De Palma would later deny reports of a rift between them, though they had a robust creative relationship.

“Tom is a very smart guy, and he had very strong opinions about things,” De Palma told Premiere magazine. “We would argue, but he always said, ‘Whatever you want to do, Brian.’ I made all the final decisions. We were deciding whether we needed the helicopter chase at the end. Tom thought about resolving the scene in the boxcar. I was pushing for the helicopter chase. I said, ‘We’re making Mission: Impossible here. We better have some wham-bang ending.’ I argued strongly about why I thought this would work, and he ultimately, I think, made the correct decision.”

Cruise certainly had no qualms about getting on that train. He clambered aboard the carriages at Pinewood Studios, in front of a blue screen, and was blasted by industrial-strength fans. “That’s really Tom standing on a train car with the wind coming in his face at hundreds of miles an hour. Trust me,” says Wagner. “It was very dangerous having to jump from one moving vehicle to another with the wind coming straight at him. We did it on the largest stage at Pinewood. It was very challenging. He would have been on a real train the whole time if he could.”

De Palma achieved what he’d set out to do. Released on May 22 1996, Mission: Impossible was the biggest hit of his career – $450 million at the global box office. “It’s better to make them at the end [of a career] rather than at the beginning,” De Palma told Wade Major about making a hit film.

Wagner credits its global success, aside from M:I being a great piece of cinema, to its international cast and clever promotion. “We treated Mission Impossible as a worldwide event,” she says. “This was an innovation in worldwide marketing because we focused on individual foreign markets rather than treating international box office as a monolith. We approached the rest of the world with the same fervour as domestic.” Paramount sent out a booklet of promotional ideas to cinema managers, which suggested – quite brilliantly – to put on helicopter rides or have sky divers dropping into cinema car parks for some extreme, gimmicky PR. (I must have missed that at our local Odeon.)

David Gordon Green returned to direct the series’ third flashback episode, and once again brought the audience back in time, as the Gemstones entered the new millennium. While the episode is set in 2000, Gordon Green explained how he and [Danny] McBride try to reference film and television of the 1980s and 1990s.

As the show’s director and one of its executive producers, Gordon Green said he leans into melding genres, and called out this episode’s pop-culture references — allusions to Brian De Palma’s “Carrie,” Olivia Newton-John in “Grease” and the “Halloween” franchise, both the original John Carpenter movies and his revival of them.

“We’re not shooting it like a comedy,” said Gordon Green. “I think part of what gives it a little bit of scope, and an unlikely interest, is because it’s not just putting the camera in the comedy place and telling the joke.

“It lets something be unexpectedly exciting or unexpectedly dramatic, and not fall into the tropes of the genre,” he continued. “And then be able to be inspired by all genres and bring it into this, [rather than] make a show that could be formulaic and could be technically, traditionally executed.”

Gordon Green’s latest revision of typical tropes occurs in the episode’s final scene, when Peter attempts to rob a bank. Rather than following him into the bank, Gordon Green positioned the camera in the diner booth where Peter had sat moments before. With a protected barrier, the audience watches Peter unsuccessfully, and almost fatally, try to rob the bank to gain the funds he had poorly invested. Gordon Green explained how that final sequence involved Zahn, a stuntman and personal friend, to ensure the “Texas switch” went off without a hitch.

“We’re just trying to up the ante, and do something different,” Gordon Green said. “It was something you had to map out and choreograph and do safely, so nobody got run over. Then you hope that the lighting stays the same so you can do it all in one take.”

He added, “It was cool to end it [that way]. We always try to build it so that there’s a bit of a launch and a leap at the end of an episode, so that it has a bit of an opera to it.”

Applying the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass culture to this type of filmmaking would not be hard: Mission: Impossible is not very original; the structure of the whole doesn’t depend on details; it respects conventional norms of what constitutes intelligibility in contemporary filmmaking. It could be seen as an example of pseudo-individuation, that which seems different but is in fact the same, whose object is to affirm capitalist culture – Popcorn laced with discourses that propagate and sustain existing relations of power, lulling its audience into believing that they live in the best of all possible worlds. This type of criticism has often been levelled against Hollywood cinema. But though productive as part of a critique, it’s a dead end when it results in mere dismissal.

The film also offers a pretty dystopic view of contemporary Western culture. There is no longer any difference between the East and the West. What happens in Kiev and Prague or Washington and London is similar. All are corrupt places with citizens under continuous surveillance. Government, which is supposed to protect, throws out morality, ethics, justice and law to get what it wants, going as far as attempting to kill an honest Cruise, who is simply and desperately trying to do the right thing. Family is far away, ineffectual, vulnerable. Friends are unreliable: they may have killed your other friends, and may yet kill you. Love, as personified by Emmanuelle Béart, is a source of longing, an object of desire (seemingly always deferred) and an instrument of betrayal (the femmes are pretty fatal here – and structurally subordinate in the narrative, as is Hunt’s Black sidekick, played by Ving Rhames; plus ça change…). The worst enemies of Western culture are the ‘Third World’ and terrorists. The worst thing that can happen to an individual is to be ‘disavowed’, to be cut off from one’s corporate community; to survive the hero must remain monadic. It’s a bleak view. The film’s utopia is a masculinist fantasy: that if one is Tom Cruise, all such problems will eventually be resolved.

This is a reading of the film that appears to give it a degree of depth. But to look at Mission: Impossible only in this way is perhaps to miss what is most interesting about it. It’s built around set-pieces (the interrogation scene in Kiev; the Embassy scene; the aquarium scene and the Hotel Europa scene in Prague; the burglary at Langley, Virginia; and finally the train scene, which begins in London) each involving some element of action and ingenuity (from characters or filmmakers). These scenes are woven through the film like songs and dances are in an old-fashioned musical: it isn’t so much that they don’t tell us anything about the characters, but that their function as spectacle exceeds their function as narrative. For exampIe, though we may need to know that Cruise’s colleagues are killed at the start, we don’t need to see it in such detail or to such effect to follow the story. Mission: Impossible is a star vehicle structured around a protagonist: but it is not important to know much about Ethan Hunt, the character Cruise plays. What’s important is how Cruise the star looks, smiles, jumps, leaps, outwits. In such movies, the star functions less as character than as an integral production value. Tom Cruise as ‘Tom Cruise’ in Mission: Impossible is its own kind of spectacle (as when he takes off his mask and is revealed to be ‘Tom Cruise’ during his star entrance at the film’s beginning); what’s more, it’s an integral part of the spectacle presented during the more elaborate action scenes (as when the wind buffets his body on top of the train in the final scene).

Like the musical using the order of musical numbers to create changes of pace and variation, Mission: Impossible tries to vary its own set-pieces in terms of length, tone and desired effect: the scene at the Hotel is medium-length and meant to be exciting; the scene in Langley where Cruise steals the diskette is long and meant to be funny and suspenseful; the scene where Cruise makes the diskette disappear in order to con Krieger (Jean Reno) is meant to be ingenious. The last action scene, the lollapalooza, is to function as the showstopper. It begins with a blast from Lalo Schifrin’s energetic television theme-tune, and reprises all previous effects (it has excitement, speed, suspense, humour and ingenuity), but faster, with more intensity and at a higher pitch.

And like the musical, much of the beauty of and meaning in Mission: Impossible comes from the expressive use of non-representational signs: colour, music, movement.

The scene at Langley where Cruise and company download the names of undercover agents into a diskette is a good example of the pleasures on offer. While Rhames hacks away at the security with his computer, Beart, Cruise and Reno disguise themselves as firemen to get into the building. Beart injects the coffee of the computer worker with a serum to force him to go to the bathroom, and plants a bug on his jacket so that his movements can be traced. In the meantime, Cruise and Reno have managed to get to the room via an airvent. So far, so familiar: this is reminiscent of the pleasures of James Bond, with gadgets, wit and a few punches thrown. As the scene proceeds, maintaining the humorous tone, a shift registers. Will the computer operator return too soon, intercepting Cruise stealing the diskette? Cruise is hung from the ceiling with wires, handled by Reno. We see a rat waddling next to Reno. Will this cause him to lose control? Will the sneeze he’s been controlling simply erupt, setting off the alarm? De Palma is a brilliant student of Hitchcock: these bits are funny and suspenseful.

And Reno does lose control. Cruise, previously floating downwards, now drops abruptly to only inches from the floor. He’s hung from wires, waving his arms as balance, to avoid touching the floor: thus the film offers us the pleasure of Cruise’s physique, his physical prowess. But his body is also reduced to a graphic element of the composition, albeit a gorgeous one: for example, in the high-angle shot which shows us Cruise (dressed in black) against a white floor crossed with thin black lines. His body seems two-dimensional; it seems to disappear into the pattern as if matter had dissolved into geometry.

Two separate moments make this scene thrilling: a drop of sweat about to hit the floor and Reno’s knife falling to the floor. Both are exciting only because of their context (if either lands, this could ruin the mission). They involve quick cuts, to enhance the sense of danger and to give an impression of movement. But they also involve the use of slow motion, to arrest and break down movement.

The combined effect is that of the sublime. The slow motion fixes our gaze with awe; the quick cuts rush us headlong into terror. It’s thrilling to watch, but it’s also fascinating because such a technique, so typical of the contemporary action/spectacle film, reduces difference into equivalence while divorcing an object from its properties. Here a drop of sweat and a knife are equally dangerous, one a natural process which does the body good, the other produced by human ingenuity and human labour to cut and harm: moreover, the knife is dangerous not because it can pierce but because it can fall.

We could interpret this by arguing that in the post-modern world, culture is more the source of terrorized amazement than nature; except its awesomeness derives not from God but from humans. But if we think of this at all, we think of it afterwards. Mission: Impossible is so thrilling that even hermeneutics are left behind, for a while. On the ride, the viewer is too busy rushing through its aesthetics to think of anything but its erotics. Mission: Impossible is a delight because in pleasing the eye and kicking the viscera, it continually asks the audience to wonder, How did they do that? And that the film does this, and how it does it, is at least as important as why, or what it all may mean.

Alright - Sissy is too busy to write a foreword, that's fine - she delivers a fabulous interview for the book....but yes, the oral history of CARRIE is about to hit the printers! I reckon I expect it to be available by September. Lots of folk to thank - of course all the CARRIE alumni who are in the book (such as Sissy, Piper, Mr. King, Brian, Nancy, Amy, William and more), the wonderful Ryan Clark, Manoah Bowman, Darren Cotzabuyucas, Ben Ohmart, Chris Dumas, Michael Broom and a bunch of other folk.
The front gatefold is very cool - Darren, my fab designer, made it look like a high school year book with all the interviewees.

Last summer, Tom Cruise was given credit for saving the theatrical experience with the widely beloved “Top Gun: Maverick.” One of our last true movie stars returns over a year later as the blockbuster experience seems to be fading with high-budget Hollywood endeavors like "The Flash" and "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" falling short of expectations. Can he be Hollywood's savior again? I hope so because “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” is a ridiculously good time. Once again, director Christopher McQuarrie, Cruise, and their team have crafted a deceptively simple thriller, a film that bounces good, bad, and in-between characters off each other for 163 minutes (an admittedly audacious runtime for a film with “Part One” in the title that somehow doesn’t feel long). Some of the overcooked dialogue about the importance of this particular mission gets repetitive, but then McQuarrie and his team will reveal some stunningly conceived action sequence that makes all the spy-speak tolerable. Hollywood is currently questioning the very state of their industry. Leave it to Ethan Hunt to accept the mission.

While this series essentially rebooted in its fourth chapter, changing tone and style significantly, this seventh film very cleverly ties back to the 1996 Brian De Palma original more than any other, almost as if it's uniting the two halves of the franchise. It’s not an origin story, but it does have the tenor of something like the excellent “Casino Royale” in how it unpacks the very purpose of a beloved character. “Dead Reckoning Part One” is about Ethan Hunt reconciling how he got to this point in his life, and McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen narratively recall De Palma’s film repeatedly. And with its sweaty, canted close-ups, Fraser Taggart’s cinematography wants you to remember the first movie—how Ethan Hunt became an agent and the price he’s been paying from the beginning.

Dead Reckoning Part One is another swaggering delight in the series, with director Christopher McQuarrie yet again finding some actual narrative grist in the continued adventures of the world’s silliest superspy. In having Ethan do battle with a ruthless AI dubbed “the Entity,” which wants to control the world’s governments, the film holds him up as an exemplar of humanity—a bold gambit, perhaps, given that Cruise is one of our strangest celebrities, but one the Mission: Impossible movies have been nudging forward for quite a while now. Someone like James Bond might be the best at what he does, but he’s still an extension of the state, and ultimately a ruthless person as a result. Hunt is technically part of America’s intelligence apparatus, but he rejects any notion of “the greater good,” instead stretching reality however he can to save everyone around him and the world at the same time.

Surrounding Ethan is his usual gaggle of pals: the tech guys Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), and the multitalented British spy Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). The big additions to the mix are two more femmes fatales, an expert pickpocket named Grace (Hayley Atwell) and an assassin named Paris (Pom Klementieff). And though our villain is nothing more than a glowing sphere that lives in the cloud, it does have a human emissary of sorts, the seething terrorist Gabriel (Esai Morales, sporting a perfectly cropped salt-and-pepper beard). All of them are hunting for a set of special keys that will do … something to the Entity; as is usual for Mission: Impossible, the details are pretty unimportant.

Still, fans of McQuarrie’s high-energy approach in the series’ prior two films might be surprised at the extent to which this entry remembers the other side of spycraft. There’s a lot of double-crossing and murky alliance-making, evoking the twisty espionage of Brian De Palma’s first Mission: Impossible, way back in 1996; to underline it, the nervy character actor Henry Czerny returns as Eugene Kittridge, now the CIA chief, who hasn’t appeared since that 1996 installment. He’s there largely to highlight the ongoing absurdity of Hunt’s “Impossible Mission Force,” the quasi-governmental agency that somehow exists alongside America’s regular intelligence apparatus and recruits agents who are better at close-up magic than they are at hand-to-hand combat.

Though the computerized Entity is the main villain, Kittridge represents an element that’s just as important in these movies: the stuffed shirt who sputters impotently as Ethan and his friends defy all logic on their way to saving the day. Dead Reckoning Part One still has plenty of wild stunts—like Ethan riding a motorcycle off a mountain, and doing martial arts atop the Orient Express—but there’s more than a hint of melancholy in between all the action, and a hint of worry that maybe the good times can’t last forever in the face of all this bureaucratic, algorithmic thought. Given that this is a Part One, the film’s conclusion is inevitably less satisfying than a proper third act, but this is a worthy entry in America’s best ongoing franchise, one where sincerity and absurdity walk hand in hand with vital, triumphant conviction.

The movie’s sustained adrenaline charge is both its strength and its shortcoming. Comparing part one of Dead Reckoning with Brian De Palma’s terrific 1996 opener, which upgraded the CIA’s covert Impossible Missions Force from its 1960s television origins to the big screen, is an illuminating insight into how audience expectations have changed in the past 27 years — or perhaps more accurately, how the major studios have reshaped audience expectations.

Working with screenwriters David Koepp and Robert Towne, De Palma assembled the nuts and bolts of an admittedly convoluted story with patience and care. He allowed his characters space to breathe while building to stylishly choreographed action sequences that bristled with the director’s customary Hitchcockian flair.

Notable among them was a nail-biting CIA heist operation in which Cruise’s Hunt was lowered into a state-of-the-art Langley security vault to copy a highly prized classified document. It set the tone for a series driven by jaw-dropping stunts, redefining the actor’s career at the same time.

In the almost three decades since that film, Cruise has become a much better actor. It’s hard to take the younger Ethan seriously now when he’s grinning like a cocky schoolboy in exchanges with Vanessa Redgrave’s smooth-as-silk arms dealer, Max — like some high school jock trying to impress the head cheerleader.

His Ethan has become more careworn, jaded, emotionally bruised; he’s acquired the gravitas that comes with loss. And the passionate, hands-on commitment with which the actor approaches each stunt, emphasizing practical execution over effects, has only intensified through the years. No one can accuse Cruise of being a performer who fails to deliver what his audience wants. Which includes running. So much running.

In that sense, Dead Reckoning Part One works like gangbusters. If something has been discarded in the storytelling craft along the way, it’s unlikely that the core fanbase will mind. But McQuarrie, who co-wrote the screenplay with Erik Jendresen (an Emmy winner for Band of Brothers), invests so much in the almost nonstop set-pieces that the connective narrative tissue becomes virtually disposable.

Sometimes it feels as if he’s boiled down the most thrilling elements, not only of the Mission: Impossible series, but of the Bond and Bourne movies, and threaded them into a sizzle reel. There’s less sense here of a story that demanded to be told in two parts — this one running two-and-three-quarter hours — than of McQuarrie and Cruise having a bunch more jaw-dropping stunts they plan to pull off and new travel-porn locations on which to unleash mayhem.

Tapping with uncannily sharp timing into a very now anxiety, the plot revolves around artificial intelligence gone rogue — “the perfect covert operation” — and the suavely sinister terrorist seeking to control it, Gabriel (Esai Morales).

The A.I. development harnesses the power to make everything from people to vessels of war undetectable, to turn allies into enemies, commandeer defense systems and manipulate the world’s finance markets. It has become a monster with a mind of its own that knows everything about everyone and can be controlled only with a cruciform key made of two bejeweled parts lost in the Russian submarine disaster that opens the movie.

As the motivation for a globe-hopping hunt to find the two halves of the key and slot them together to tame the A.I. renegade before Gabriel can get his paws on it, it’s a serviceable plot. But it’s elaborated in numbing scenes lumped in among the fun stuff, with Ethan and his associates trudging through leaden exposition dumps, intoning gravely about “The Entity,” as it’s come to be known. Ominous statements are batted about like, “Whoever controls the Entity controls the truth,” which I guess is tangible enough as a threat to world order.

But when we get to see the digital mega-brain at work, looking like a giant fibrous, pulsating cyber sphincter, the whole thing becomes a bit silly. And if after the first half-hour or so you’re still following the plotting intricacies of how the parts of the key got to wherever they are, whether they’re real or fake, who has them and how the IMF crew plans to get them back, congratulations.

Coming after the series high of 2018’s Fallout, in which McQuarrie found an ideal balance of story, character and turbocharged spectacle, this aspect of the film, it must be acknowledged, is disappointing. If De Palma’s Mission: Impossible was considered overly complicated, the storyline here is an absolute maze. But then, as soon as Ethan starts going at it with a pair of trained assassins in a tight Venetian vicoletto, or any number of other bravura sequences in beautiful locations, you’re unlikely to care much about all that Entity blather.

Until the previous entry in the franchise, Mission: Impossible – Fallout (the one with Henry Cavill reloading his forearms), these movies largely stood alone, but Dead Reckoning Part One reaches into the past on numerous fronts. The return of the first movie’s morally dubious intelligence head, Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), serves less as a wistful cameo and more as a throwback to the series’ neo-noir roots – a welcome antidote to a summer overrun with empty nostalgia à la The Flash and the new Indiana Jones. Ethan Hunt’s (Cruise) need to go rogue in Dead Reckoning is a direct result of characters and events of the original, Brian De Palma-directed Mission: Impossible, leading to a scenario where Hunt’s own government can’t be trusted with the movie’s dangerous McGuffin: an all-powerful, artificially intelligent algorithm dubbed “the Entity.”

Each one of McQuarrie’s movies has felt distinct from each other. With this movie, it seems as if he is putting his spin on the feel of Brian de Palma’s original Mission: Impossible movie from 1996. There is a lot of that tension, especially from the original film’s opening act, where the characters are racing to keep up with the looming terror around them. The film even brings back Ethan’s sleight-of-hand magic, Henry Czerny as Kittridge, and a finale action sequence set on a train. McQuarrie takes everything great about that original film and combines it with the flair that he has consistently brought to this series.

It takes a while to get into the groove of Dead Reckoning, which trades the gliding high gloss of Fallout for something grainier, stranger, more comedic. Its harsh camera angles evoke Brian De Palma’s 1996 Mission: Impossible film, no doubt a direct allusion. There’s even a climactic train sequence in Dead Reckoning, just as there was 27 years ago. McQuarrie seems done aping (and, occasionally, upping) Christopher Nolan and is returning to the M:I franchise’s roots. Understandable, given that we are, allegedly, approaching the end of its run.

Cruise shows little signs of slowing, even if his timing is off as he uncharacteristically struggles to get Dead Reckoning’s gears turning. But the stakes of the film make it feel as if finality is in the offing: a sentient AI is threatening the entire world, while human-led nations (and a couple of criminal enterprises) do a mad scramble to get it under their control. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, either super spy or demigod, finds himself at the center of this narrative, largely for personal reasons. The memory of a lost love comes whispering out of the past while a contemporary, quasi-romantic relation is tossed into new peril. The macro and the micro are at risk from a holistic threat, one that will define the core mission of Ethan’s life.

Which, arguably, was also true of Fallout, but Dead Reckoning works hard to sell its even-bigger-ness. The AI stuff is too magical sci-fi for my taste—AI is a creeping menace, surely, but this foe plays too B-movie (think, Transcendence) and too all-powerful (think any superhero movie) for the relatively sophisticated Mission: Impossible films. It’s difficult to take things seriously, then, as McQuarrie (who wrote the script with Eric Jendresen) throws a heap of exposition at us while also trying to keep things light. (There’s a Roman street chase involving a tiny yellow Fiat, for example.) The balance is off, which even Cruise’s agility can’t correct.

An hour or so in, though, the film finds its footing, somewhere around the time that Ethan and his coterie of helpers (including new player Hayley Atwell, as a master thief in way over her head) arrive in Venice. There the film’s De Palmian moodiness is put to good use, in an arresting and somber sequence set in the impossibly narrow streets of the world’s most picturesque city. That then leads our hero to the stunt to end all stunts, one already shown almost in its entirety in promotional videos released months ago. It’s a shame that this jaw-dropping act—in which Tom Cruise pilots a motorcycle off a cliff and then does a sort of mid-air, Alpine BASE jump—has been spoiled. Technically impressive as it is, it’s been sapped of surprise.

But the subsequent train set piece is a satisfying stunner, unrelenting and convincing even in its dubious physics. I suppose it’s fitting enough that a Part One should really only get up to speed when it’s nearly over; that steadily built momentum is meant to rocket us into the finale, which will be released next year.

The first half of a two-part story, Dead Reckoning Part One is an exhilarating blockbuster, distilling pure spectacle into a two-and-a-half hour feature. It’s also the first time Mission: Impossible is deep in conversation with itself. McQuarrie departs from his action-first style to pay homage to Brian De Palma’s first Mission: Impossible — all intense close-ups, canted angles, and heightened, pulpy paranoia. This creates a sense of full-circle continuity the Mission: Impossible films rarely have, but it also feels like McQuarrie is playing in another director’s sand box when he should be doing what he does best: delivering Tom Cruise’s latest death-defying stunt in the most breathtaking, jaw-dropping way possible. It’s in those moments that Dead Reckoning Part One transcends anything any other action tentpole can even dream of touching.

Why did Cruise, his first-time producing partner Paula Wagner, a multitude of screenwriters including Steven Zaillian, David Koepp & Robert Towne, and ultimately Brian De Palma, choose to destroy the very fabric of, what on the face of it, made Mission Impossible Mission Impossible? Because if you watch the film, and compare it with the TV series, they are without a doubt different beasts.

Mind you, De Palma fools you into believing it might be a faithful adaptation with his first act, following the opening sequence whereby Phelps, Hunt and the IMF team use a range of theatrics. There are the infamous masks which would become a staple of the entire ensuing franchise, through to a con job using sets, performances and disguises, in order to get what they need from a target.

The sixth film, Fallout, pays homage to this in a similar sequence before its own credit sequence, but the difference here is that the audience are in on the performance. De Palma gives us what we expect from Mission Impossible: teamwork, staging and illusion.

The credits, which recall the original series too with a reworking of Lalo Schiffrin’s iconic theme and flashes of the mission to come, reinforce De Palma’s own illusion. The longer con is on the audience themselves.

Hence why, when De Palma by the end of the first act, kills almost the entirety of the IMF team—including seemingly Phelps himself—during a mission that everyone expects them to succeed in as part of the greater challenge, you are left reeling. This has to be part of the illusion of the narrative, surely? The IMF team can’t all be dead! The clue is in casting Cruise, whose shelf-life as a global cinematic superstar is perhaps one of the most durable in Hollywood history. Cruise is now in his fifth decade as a leading man. Just let that sink in a moment. By the mid-90’s, he was very much established thanks to films from Top Gun all the way through to A Few Good Men. Cruise’s name was above the poster. Cruise was Mission Impossible now. This early on, however, we just didn’t know it.

In short, Mission Impossible does not yet understand Ethan Hunt. It presents a very different character to the one Cruise eventually builds. Ethan, here, is the begrudging, vengeful spy betrayed, as far as he is concerned, by his own government after he is fitted up as a mole inside the IMF. The prey of the CIA, in the form of Henry Czerny’s delightfully officious Kittridge.

It kickstarts what would become some of Mission Impossible’s most popular tropes, second only perhaps to the mask disguises – the mole and the disavowal. There is not one Mission Impossible film which does not either contain a mole working within American intelligence or Ethan’s loyalty and fidelity being questioned. All of this began in Mission Impossible the moment Ethan Hunt loses his team, because even despite characters such as Ving Rhames’ Luther Stickell becoming a loyal ally over successive films, not one picture in this franchise has Ethan working, truly, as the cog inside a functional unit. Ethan is the machine.

De Palma’s film is, principally, a deconstruction of what made the 1960’s TV series work. That show was created at the height of the Cold War, with American and Soviet tensions providing a backdrop for the kind of television that would take the post-war austerity of the 1950’s and frame it in glossier, brighter contexts. Mission Impossible came from the same Desilu Productions stable as Star Trek, which premiered the year before and as MI portrayed a unit which using trickery and manipulation to overcome the enemy, Star Trek looked forward to a future in which the hostilities of the Cold War would be a thing of the past in a new American, even globally united, frontier. Both shows even share Star Trek breakout star Leonard Nimoy as part of their casts.

Whereas Star Trek permeated and managed a breakthrough toward the tail end of the darker 1970s in the American consciousness, Mission Impossible struggled to bring its brand of theatrical fancy back to a public who had moved on past the anxieties of the Cold War. Its return in the late 80’s, just a couple of years before the end of the century-defining conflict, didn’t last long.

By the time De Palma’s big screen adaptation was in production, the Cold War was over. The Russian bear had been put down and, suddenly, American espionage didn’t work in the same way. Despite nasty brush fire wars across the 90’s such as Iraq or Kosovo, Mission Impossible returned in the decade defined by Francis Fukuyama in his book ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ as the titular ‘end of history’.

Koepp and Towne’s eventual, credited script reflects this in Jim Phelps. When he is unmasked as the villainous architect of the NOC List theft, Phelps’ rationale is revealed in dialogue he offers freely to Ethan in outlining the mindset of the villain, Job, he is trying to convince Ethan exists:

You think about it Ethan, it was inevitable. No more Cold War. No more secrets you keep from yourself. Answer to no one but yourself. Then you wake up one morning and find out the President is running the country without your permission. The son of a bitch, how dare he? Then you realise, it’s over. You are an obsolete piece of hardware, not worth upgrading, you got a lousy marriage and sixty two grand a year.

There is quite a lot to unpick here. Principally the fact that Phelps’ turn to the dark side, the betrayal of his country and the American values we saw his same character embody in the 1960’s, at the height of the conflict against the Soviets, was fuelled by the lack of a defined ‘enemy’ for the intelligence community to fight. The destruction of his team also represents a pre-millennial fear that the enemy could be anywhere, even within. As opposed to the ideological Communist bloc close in our mind’s eye, but in literal terms far from our homeland.

Mission Impossible‘s revival reflects a world filled with shadowy, unknown forces who could strike anywhere, at any time, right at the heart of where we feel safe. It almost prefigures the rise of spontaneous terrorism. Ultimately, Mission Impossible is trying to understand its place in a new geopolitical landscape, as well as in the changing trends and emerging post-modern narratives of the 1990s.

Phelps in his soliloquy also mentions ‘hardware’ and this hints at the emergence of technological means in the post-Cold War paradigm that would replace the need for spies in the field doing the heavy lifting. This is in its infancy in Mission Impossible, which feels quite charming in watching Vanessa Redgrave’s playful arms dealer Max trying to upload floppy discs onto a computer system before the Channel Tunnel cuts off her connection. But the point remains that intelligence agencies now no longer need men like Phelps.

Conversely, De Palma also wonders if they need the IMF, hence why he happily takes down the team thanks to their insider, and leaves Ethan free and clear to create his own ramshackle group of mercenaries to help him clear his name – primarily in the standout CIA Langley set piece, which remains one of the most impressive, iconic and not to mention tense, sequences in action cinema of the last thirty years.

Mission Impossible does not sell Ethan, in this film, as any kind of James Bond proxy. Cruise’s charm is perfectly evident but Ethan is not a seductive, one-man killing machine, or indeed the death-defying nihilist he becomes post-MI3. Ethan here is a touch more enigmatic and distant, which befits the colder stylistics of De Palma’s approach to the material. His lens channels Hitchcock while imbuing the frame with a distinctly De Palma-level of paranoia.