Impossible 1 Is Both an Anomaly and Standard-Bearer for the Franchise

The first installment of a long-running film series can sometimes be a strange outlier. Much like the pilot for a TV show, it can represent a central idea that hasn’t crystalized yet, the creative players having not become fully comfortable in this universe yet. Sometimes, these initial features can even be excessively divorced from more recent entries in the series. Just look at how the low-key DVD player heists of The Fast and the Furious feel like they take place on a different planet compared to the high-flying antics ofFurious 7. Similarly, could anyone involved in the original Child’s Play even comprehend the idea of an eventual follow-up like Seed of Chucky?

So it is with the Mission: Impossible movies, whose most recent entries have established familiar norms for the series. There are regular cast members (Tom Cruise of course, but also Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ving Rhames) while Christopher McQuarrie, with the two upcoming sequels, will now have directed a whopping four entries in this saga or 50% of the entire franchise. These installments usually see leading man Cruise engage in spectacle that would kill mortal men while the rest of the runtime is dedicated to globe-trotting missions full of adventure.

The first Mission: Impossiblemovie from 1996 isn’t divorced from these qualities, but there’s a stark difference between this entry in the franchise and later films like 2018’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout. Watching this inaugural entry 25 years after its initial theatrical run, it becomes fascinating to unpack how this title relates to the larger franchise. While this initial Mission: Impossible set the tone for what was to come in some ways, in many other respects, subsequent entries have found their own, separate action movie rhythm.

One consistent element across these films, though, is Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. From the get-go, when Hunt is one of the few members of his team not to be murdered during a mission gone wrong, his ingenuity under pressure is intact. This is a superhuman without a superhero suit. A guy who, when he says he’s gonna break into the CIA headquarters in Langley, is absolutely gonna break into the CIA headquarters at Langley. And Tom Cruise’s star persona isn’t suppressed through the character of Hunt. Onn the contrary, the character — both in 1996 and 2018 — leans into it. This is one of the few fictional characters large enough to hold Cruise’s oversized public image.

The playful nature of the series that would become more prominent inGhost Protocol is also glimpsed in Brian De Palma‘s inagural entry. Look no further than the moment when it looks like a scurrying rat will jeopardize Franz Krieger’s (Jean Reno) ability to hold Hunt up as he steals secrets from a CIA computer. There’s a cheekiness to putting the entire fate of a world-altering mission into how close a rat will get to Jean Reno. Future Mission: Impossible movies would make greater use of those kinds of unexpected foils, but Mission: Impossible established that Hunt’s missions could be jeopardized by even the tiniest bits of mundane business.

That CIA break-in scene also established how these Mission: Impossible movies don’t just deliver run-of-the-mill fist fights and shootouts. They deliver instantly memorable imagery that makes audiences wonder just how exactly Hunt will get out of this one. The shot of Hunt dangling precariously, arms unfolded, just inches from the floor of a secure CIA room is so iconic that movies and TV shows still parody it to this day. Subsequent movies delivering similarly unforgettable tableaus of Hunt clinging to airplanes or the Burj Khalifa owe a great deal to the stylish imagery of this original movie.

But Mission: Impossible is not all obvious parallels to the films it would spawn. The greatest deviation from future Mission: Impossiblemoviescomes from where the focus of the film lies. Later entries in this franchise emphasized elaborate set pieces, with McQuarrie’s installments being made in the mold of elaborate Buster Keaton escapades more than anything else. Films like Rogue Nation and Fallout are about propulsive running, car chases, and everything in between with only the slightest moments to catch one’s breath. These are movies as light on their feet as Hunt himself, and it can make for an incredibly fun ride.

However, there’s something interesting in how the 1996 Mission: Impossible chooses to focus on a darker tone, no doubt owed to the thematics of Hunt being betrayed by one of his own team members. De Palma is very much making a Mission: Impossible movie in the mold of his earlier films like Blow-Up, where a sense of devastating uncertainty permeates even the most intimate scenes. Hunt doesn’t know who to trust in this initial feature and that means De Palma employs an atmosphere of cramped ambiguity more befitting an Alan J. Pakula film than later Mission: Impossible titles.

The camerawork here is also much more emblematic of De Palma as a filmmaker rather than the visual hallmarks of later adventures. Not only does De Palma throw in a split-diopter shot (of course), but he also employs a unique visual technique to convey the perspective of Hunt. Several times in the story, the camera shifts, without any warning, to Hunt’s point-of-view. Modern action films, like Doom or Hardcore Henry, use this technique for more intense fight scenes. Here, this viscerally immersive detail is utilized for the purposes of suspense.

Both De Palma and cinematographer Stephen H. Burum’s commitment to idiosyncratic filming details like that are peppered throughout the film and lend a sense of constant intensity to the proceedings. The escalating tension in a restaurant conversation between Hunt and Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), for instance, gets much of its riveting nature from how it’s filmed through a series of intentionally disorienting low-angles and close-ups. Just as Hunt — who is slowly realizing he’s being accused of murdering his cohorts — is coming to understand his world has turned upside down, so too does the camerawork suggest to the viewer that things are askew.

The firstMission: Impossiblealso features more explicitreferences to the TV show that inspired it than future installments. Not only did the movie’s marketing lean on audience familiarity with the original TV series, but Mission: Impossible even utilized characters from this earlier show, namely the return of the character Jim Phelps, here portrayed by Jon Voight.

Still, while this initial Mission: Impossible did make use of one of the most prominent characters from the original TV show, it did also foreshadow its successors entirely throwing out the source material. For one thing, Phelps is here framed as a secret villain, a development so wildly detached from the character’s original persona that it inspired frustration in Phelps’s original performer.

For another, Phelps is the exception rather than the rule in the characters of the 1996 Mission: Impossible, which largely consists of original creations. This paved the way for future movies to go even further and jettison any trace of characters from the 1960s TV show in favor of an entirely original cast. In its approach to new and previously-existing characters, we see a perfect distillation of how the original Mission: Impossible movie is both an anomaly and a standard-bearer for the larger franchise.

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