Choosing to Accept It

Back in the glory days of physical media, when Paramount used to organize junkets for Blu-ray releases – yes, really – the studio flew about a dozen home-video journalists out to the International Spy Museum in Washington to talk to Brad Bird about making the fourth Mission: Impossible movie, Ghost Protocol.

It was, as you might expect, a good day; not only did we get to hang around Obama-era D.C. and do an escape room built around a Cold War surveillance operation going spectacularly wrong, which was fun, but I got to spend twenty minutes with Brad Bird, which is a pleasure worth all the assorted nonsense of a press junket.

We talked about animation and live-action moviemaking, we talked about screenwriting and character design, about the way the set pieces in Ghost Protocol are structured around the love of precision and mechanics that runs through all of his work, and so on. And then we moved on to Tom Cruise, who by the fourth film in the series was taking his place as the principal architect of the franchise.

Bird said that Tom Cruise was a “ferocious” collaborator, forever pushing to make the series’ set pieces as memorable as possible, but also committed as a producer to enabling directors to do whatever the hell they wanted, deferring on creative questions on-set so he could focus on his performance and let the movie happen around him.

It’s a good answer, and I believe it, but only later did I realize that sidesteps the stuff that happens before Tom Cruise gets onto the set, like script development and casting, where a producer with absolute control can do a lot to shape the vision of a project. And over the years, I’ve noticed an interesting theme lurking in the subtext of the Mission: Impossible series.

No, not the thing where Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is an invincible superhero, the world’s fastest thinker and strategist, possessed of endless resources and unfailing instincts – basically, the version of Tom Cruise the actor has been putting forward ever since he established himself as Tom Cruise TM in Top Gun and The Color of Money. That’s been baked into every Cruise project for decades, which is why the rare movies that cast him as someone who isn’t in control of a given situation – Magnolia, Edge of Tomorrow, even the dopey Oblivion – are so much more interesting.

Come to think of it, Ghost Protocol also falls into that category, being the one Mission: Impossible movie where Hunt is constantly being second-guessed and wrong-footed; it’s the one where his IMF team is disavowed after they’re fingered in the bombing of the Kremlin, leaving them with no formal support or backup and forced to rely on old or malfunctioning tech to save the world from a madman bent on starting a nuclear war. It’s also the one that introduces Jeremy Renner’s prickly analyst William Brandt as someone who can see all the ways Ethan’s schemes can go disastrously wrong, and pushes back on every last-minute improvisation – usually to comic effect, but also to hang a lantern on the character’s infallibility.

Of course, it turns out Ethan is always right, and when things go wrong he’s the person you want in your corner; that’s the Tom Cruise guarantee. And in the very next film, Rogue Nation, Hunt was being canonized as “the living manifestation of destiny” by Alec Baldwin’s grumpy Secretary in a monologue so overwritten that I was sure it was Ethan himself under a mask, having a little fun with his self-image. But these movies don’t let Ethan Hunt have fun. Tom Cruise? He’s having the best time, jumping off of things or onto other things as cars whiz past his face or helicopter blades spin towards him or somebody steals his parachute during a high-dive or whatever else seems like a great idea. Ethan, though, has to go through life perpetually clenched, braced for the next betrayal.

And that’s the real theme of the Mission: Impossible movies, which emerges when you revisit the franchise because the 4K editions of the first six features were reissued early this summer in the spiffy steelbook packaging you saw above: Nearly all of them turn on an enemy within, a rogue agent who’s using the machinery of the Impossible Mission Force against itself. I hesitate to name the baddies if you haven’t seen the films, but it’s not always a twist: Both M:I 2 and M:I 5 – Rogue Nation let us know who the turncoat is right away, while M:I 6 – Fallout plays a fun game where the identity of the secret puppeteer is screamingly obvious from the character’s very first moment on screen, and yet no one in the movie is allowed to figure it out before Ethan can. It’s really only the first and third films that try to surprise us with a third-act reveal about a supposedly trusted colleague, mentor or boss; Ghost Protocol is the only movie that doesn’t offer any version of this twist, though its primary villain is a once-respectable nuclear strategist using his knowledge of the IMF’s own procedures against them.

While I haven’t yet watched M:I 7 – Dead Reckoning Part One I’ll be surprised if it hasn’t hidden a mole somewhere within the IMF. There’s always one, because for whatever reason Tom Cruise seems obsessed with Scientology’s concept of the Suppressive Person, that antisocial character who exists to sabotage the happiness of other people, either through open aggression or more cultivated backstabbing. Scientologists who encounter an SP within their family or circle of friends are encouraged to “disconnect” from that person – cutting off all communication – to preserve themselves.

You can see why this theme might appeal to someone like Cruise, who’s not just the world’s biggest movie star but also the global face of his religion, and thus surrounded by a great many people invested in protecting him from uncomfortable questions and conversations. Are the Mission: Impossible films about Tom Cruise’s genius-level ability to spot a toxic influence, or are they about the way suppressive people are forever trying to manipulate Tom Cruise and cause him to question his own brilliance? If one truly sees oneself as the living manifestation of destiny, what happens if one turns out to be mistaken?

I truly don’t know how much of the movies really represent Cruise wrestling with himself and his screen persona, but I’ll say this for the Mission: Impossible franchise: No other series of films is as explicitly about its star, and it is genuinely fascinating to watch Cruise allow the likes of Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, Brad Bird and finally Christopher McQuarrie to play with his screen image.

Along with its 1996 companion Jerry Maguire, De Palma’s first film marks the end of Cruise’s cocky-young-man career, introducing Ethan Hunt as an overmatched kid who’s on the run and forced to infiltrate the entire American spy apparatus in order to save it from one of its own. Woo’s M:I 2 is an utterly goofy exercise in empty style that spends two full hours wondering whether Tom Cruise looks good with long hair – he does not – and somehow making the threat of a world-extincting plague feel like the least urgent thriller premise in history.

Abrams galvanizes things in M:I III, which makes it all very personal, pitting Ethan against Philip Seymour Hoffman’s pissy arms dealer Owen Davian, who has Someone On The Inside but also makes the extremely uncool decision to kill Ethan’s protégé in the first act and kidnap his very nice wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who up until now thought Ethan worked for the DMV. Monaghan’s radiant presence as Julia also resonates through the rest of the series: Ghost Protocol finds Ethan grieving the end of their marriage, while Fallout lets him consider the relationship they might have had.

Rogue Nation and Fallout are more direct explorations of Tom Cruise Is Ethan Hunt, with the speechifying and the increasingly elaborate stunts, on which McQuarrie’s screenplays begin to hang increasingly large lanterns, implying that this HALO jump into Paris or that helicopter dogfight is happening because Ethan Hunt needs to do it, rather than Tom Cruise thinking it’d be cool. And I recalled Brad Bird’s comment about Cruise always pushing to make the set pieces more and more memorable; when did that turn into a need for realism bordering on self-mythologizing? When did the Mission: Impossible movies become the “Tom Cruise is actually doing this” movies? Was it when they went to IMAX, and CGI artists got so good at removing safety wires, harnesses and gimbals that Cruise believes he’s, well, actually doing all of this? It’s unknowable, and truly fascinating.

It’s also just fun. With the exception of the second film, the Mission: Impossible movies are excellent commercial entertainments, smartly written and reliably involving adventure pictures with strong casts and peerless craftspeople all having what appears to be a really good time working at a level that a successful franchise allows as it creeps towards the 30-year mark. The Bond films would kill for this level of consistency, and McQuarrie’s addition of Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust in Rogue Nation – a character who’s not just Ethan’s equal but capable of doing the job of his entire team, often in heels – gave the series a jolt of new energy just as the running times started to bloat.

Speaking of which, I don’t quite know why Dead Reckoning needs to run 163 minutes, but I find myself excited to watch it just the same. We’ll see how it shakes out this week.

Mission: Impossible, Mission: Impossible 2, Mission: Impossible III, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Mission: Impossible – Fallout are all available from Paramount Home Entertainment in those very nice 4K/Blu-ray combo steelbooks I mentioned above, and also in more conventional packaging. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One arrives Tuesday on 4K, Blu-ray and DVD.