It all started with that mythical explosion of a gigantic fish tank in the center of Prague. "If you want to make a deal with the devil, fine, but I want to make sure you do it in hell," Eugene Kittridge, director of the Impossible Missions Force, retorted to a very furious agent Ethan Hunt in the first movie of a saga that is premiering its final chapter today. It all started with that mythical explosion and with Tom Cruise jumping from the water tank among glass, barely escaping the gigantic wave that the explosion had caused.
What was truly extraordinary about that scene was that Cruise filmed every second of the spectacle.
Mission Impossible assumes its Final Sentence today, but it has been almost 30 years since it changed the rules of action movies. It had the whole package: countless explosions, a twisted and magnetic plot full of twists, overwhelming special effects, and a Hollywood star leading the way. But it added an ingredient that no other film had achieved: its star experienced everything that happened to the character firsthand.
Tom Cruise's commitment to the franchise was practically sealed with that explosive fish tank. "The scene didn't look right with a stunt double. I told Tom, 'You'll have to do it yourself if we want it to work for real.' When we were about to shoot, he approached me and said, 'I'm just an actor.' I replied, 'Tom, you have to give it a try.' And he did. I think he decided to take on all the action scenes himself when he realized that he could probably do them better than any stunt double," recalled Brian De Palma, director of the first Mission Impossible, in a recent interview with Deadline.
Since 1996, the saga has had eight installments, five directors, over 3.5 billion euros at the box office, a dazzling array of familiar faces, a plethora of gunshots, explosions, and impossible chases (no one on the internet has counted them, which indeed seems truly impossible), but it has never lost its essence.
"I think he decided to take on all the action scenes himself when he understood that he could do them better than any stunt double"
And that essence has a first and last name.
Australian screenwriter, writer, and cultural critic Clem Bastow attended the premiere of the penultimate Mission Impossible last July dressed as a homage to Ethan Hunt, dressed in black from head to toe and with a USB earring. She did it not only as a nod to the device, almost as ubiquitous as Cruise in the franchise at hand, but the important thing was what it contained: her doctoral thesis.
To investigate how Hollywood action movies convey emotion through spectacle, Clem spent almost five years watching the same 15 titles, over and over again. She recounted in an article in The Guardian that in the weeks leading up to the submission, she would play them as background music while writing. In the same text, she concluded that Mission Impossible is the best action franchise in movie history.
"What sets it apart is that behind the explosions, even during them, there is a very human story about connection. Ethan Hunt may be one of the world's best spies, but he is also a man with a job that complicates any chance of maintaining a relationship. It is, essentially, a cinema very close to domestic drama," explained the Australian.
"Behind the explosions, even during them, there is a very human story about connection"
Besides challenging digital omnipresence and even the personal security of its main star to exude realism, even in the era of artificial intelligence - or precisely, why not, as a manifesto against it - Mission Impossible has something else that no one else has: a plot that goes far beyond its characters.
If the entire James Bond franchise revolves around the personality of the spy, his weaknesses and strengths, his greater or lesser humanity depending on who portrays him, Ethan Hunt is the anti-character, a simple vehicle for advancing the story. After 30 years and eight movies, viewers know almost nothing about him: who he is, where he comes from, what he likes to drink... And we couldn't care less.
Perhaps that's why, while the imagery created by the MI6 agent revolves around elegance, luxury cars, and a martini "shaken, not stirred," the American spy universe is based on iconic images that never go out of style and have not aged for new generations. "Leading up to Final Sentence, we had seen Ethan Hunt-Tom Cruise jump on a motorcycle into the void, climb the Burj Khalifa with suction cups, walk on the roofs of the entire global railway network in free fall, break the world record for free diving, or play Twister with two helicopters on the peaks of very snowy mountains," summarized the film critic of EL MUNDO Luis Martínez in his review of the latest installment, premiered last Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival and to which, somewhat unusually for him, he gave five resounding stars.
If Daniel Craig's Bond embraced realism when he felt the breath of Jason Bourne on his neck, Mission Impossible never strayed from the path of the incredible. As Ben Stiller says in the DVD extras of the second movie, if it weren't for that, it would be called Impossible Mission.