1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 65: Mission: Impossible
Brian De Palma likes to begin with a “movie within a movie”; see, for example, Sisters, Blow Out, and Body Double. (Well, Sisters begins with a game show broadcast, but same diff.)
He’s signalling that the movie is going to be about other movies. Hitchcock movies, usually.
Indeed, this is how Mission: Impossible begins, with a spy watching other spies on a monitor as they perform a macabre deception upon another spy.
One of the performers is Emmanuelle Béart. She looks glamorously bloody and dead. Another is Tom Cruise, in a grotesque old-man disguise. If we didn’t already know this was a spy/gadget /action flick, we’d think it was about vampires. Thematically, it is a vampire movie, kind of.
De Palma isn’t alluding so much to old Mission: Impossible TV episodes as to other De Palma, and, by extension, to classic cinema of the darkly comical, foreboding sort. That’s how you’re supposed to watch this.
There are six other Mission: Impossibles after this one. A seventh is forthcoming. All are Tom Cruise “vehicles.” De Palma’s, the series opener, is the oddball, the parody of the whole series. Talk about prescience.
I suppose, if you take the vampire suggestion seriously, you could interpret the whole series as a vampire story: Tom Cruise is a decent young guy who catches the vampire disease in the first movie and then must avoid transmitting it as he ages. But that’s hardly a necessary interpretation.
Most theatergoers probably went to see the helicopter in the Chunnel. That sort of thing is fine. It’s done better in the later Mission: Impossibles. I love it when Cruise climbs the Burj Khalifa in a sandstorm (movie no. 4) and when he skydives onto Paris in a lightning storm (movie no. 6). I have near-zero desire to see either of this summer’s dueling blockbusters, Oppenheimer and Barbie, but I’ll be sure not to miss Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.
I have inordinate affection for Cruise. I expect him to’ve further perfected action-movie-elder-statesmanship, just as late-career Cristiano Ronaldo refined the tap-in goal.
That’s why it’s so funny to see Cruise in 1996 shuffling about in old man’s wrinkles and a prosthetic nose and mustache in the series’s first scene. People talk about Cruise’s self-mocking mask in Vanilla Sky, but Mission: Impossible did that gag first.
He’s signalling that the movie is going to be about other movies. Hitchcock movies, usually.
Indeed, this is how Mission: Impossible begins, with a spy watching other spies on a monitor as they perform a macabre deception upon another spy.
One of the performers is Emmanuelle Béart. She looks glamorously bloody and dead. Another is Tom Cruise, in a grotesque old-man disguise. If we didn’t already know this was a spy/gadget /action flick, we’d think it was about vampires. Thematically, it is a vampire movie, kind of.
De Palma isn’t alluding so much to old Mission: Impossible TV episodes as to other De Palma, and, by extension, to classic cinema of the darkly comical, foreboding sort. That’s how you’re supposed to watch this.
There are six other Mission: Impossibles after this one. A seventh is forthcoming. All are Tom Cruise “vehicles.” De Palma’s, the series opener, is the oddball, the parody of the whole series. Talk about prescience.
I suppose, if you take the vampire suggestion seriously, you could interpret the whole series as a vampire story: Tom Cruise is a decent young guy who catches the vampire disease in the first movie and then must avoid transmitting it as he ages. But that’s hardly a necessary interpretation.
Most theatergoers probably went to see the helicopter in the Chunnel. That sort of thing is fine. It’s done better in the later Mission: Impossibles. I love it when Cruise climbs the Burj Khalifa in a sandstorm (movie no. 4) and when he skydives onto Paris in a lightning storm (movie no. 6). I have near-zero desire to see either of this summer’s dueling blockbusters, Oppenheimer and Barbie, but I’ll be sure not to miss Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.
I have inordinate affection for Cruise. I expect him to’ve further perfected action-movie-elder-statesmanship, just as late-career Cristiano Ronaldo refined the tap-in goal.
That’s why it’s so funny to see Cruise in 1996 shuffling about in old man’s wrinkles and a prosthetic nose and mustache in the series’s first scene. People talk about Cruise’s self-mocking mask in Vanilla Sky, but Mission: Impossible did that gag first.
