1996 Directed by Brian De Palma
When Ethan Hunt, the leader of a crack espionage team whose perilous operation has gone awry with no explanation, discovers that a mole has penetrated the CIA, he's surprised to learn that he's the No. 1 suspect. To clear his name, Hunt now must ferret out the real double agent and, in the process, even the score.
Tom Cruise Jon Voight Henry Czerny Emmanuelle Béart Jean Reno Ving Rhames Kristin Scott Thomas Vanessa Redgrave Emilio Estevez Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė Karel Dobrý Marcel Iures Rolf Saxon Olegar Fedoro Dale Dye Ion Caramitru Valentina Yakunina Marek Vašut Nathan Osgood Michael Rogers Keith Campbell John McLaughlin Andreas Wisniewski Ricco Ross Mark Houghton Annabel Mullion Garrick Hagon David Schneider Helen Lindsay Show All…
After PULP FICTION maybe the pop masterpiece of the 90s? Probably hyperbole, but minutes after my umpteenth viewing it's the truth.
"Would you like to watch a movie?"
Usually a respected auteur like Brian De Palma doesn't get credit for delivering a great piece of pop blockbuster entertainment unless he or she subverts it in some way, deconstructs the genre or introduces some kind of wildly transgressive element like Verhoeven's satire or Scott's formal mayhem, but that's not what De Palma does here. This is more like his Manhunter, where a great director takes pulpy source material and turns it into a meditation on the act of watching, and the romance and excitement of movies themselves. In the opening sequence, IMF are basically established as a film crew, creating a fake scenario in order to get the name of a spy…
94/100
Mission: Impossible is delightfully cheesy, aged to perfection and surrounded by the meatiest strip of bacon ever crafted. It's a tasty and junky blast, from the first frame to the last. Brian De Palma has always been known for his sensual and gleefully silly ventures, all of which possess immaculate form and content. but this is easily his most delicious in regards to spookiness. The set-pieces here are just magnificent, relishing in flawless camerawork and ingenious pacing, and it's all enhanced by Danny Elfman's peerless score. In spite of its commitment to tone, De Palma's film also has a rat complicating things and dangerous chewing gum. Fun, fun, and fun.
It's all about the scene in the third act when Ethan and Jim reunite and have a drink together. Jim is trying to convince Ethan that Kittridge is the mole, not knowing Ethan already figured out it was Jim because of the Drake Hotel bible. So Ethan, having the upper hand, narrates a flashback where he pretends to realize how Kittridge did it, all for Jim's benefit -- meanwhile, DePalma's visuals tell a different story: the way Ethan is seeing it, watching Jim take out the IMF team. And even in that sequence, there's a shot of Claire taking out Hannah, and then one of Jim taking out Hannah, because Ethan isn't sure yet of Claire's loyalty. And he can't…
94
Still the gold standard of auteur-franchise-fuckery. De Palma lays out all the traditional crayons and colors inside the lines, yet it still plays like one great big con-job. The *classic* opening, literally dividing its space and revealing itself as a movie-set, is only the beginning of how De Palma constantly expands and constricts his canvas. Shooting wide and large, in the case of the final train/helicopter action set-piece (which is still an all-timer), and shrinking a 'light-bulb' revelation to nothing more than conjoined edits and alternate viewpoints find common ground in his delicious zooms, ghostly steadicam, and operatic tendencies. The looming fog, traveling gazes, and canted angles are right out of early-British-period Hitchcock and Film Noir, but there's a few additions such as exploding chewing gum, floppy-disc-drives, and (gasp!) email. So assured it'll re-wire the brain.
The first Mission Impossible is interesting, both for its Brian DePalma touches and its 90s aesthetic (shoutout to David Rudnick's 'Nokiawave'). But it's also curiously empty? There's a blankness to it and Ethan Hunt too. Never has an entire franchise been built on so little.
why does it seems that it’s the 878362 movie of a franchise and i don’t get anything
After revisiting, I’m realizing a lot of people I know were going for the 1996 Ethan hunt look well into the 2000s
Watched for the Tom Cruise project but wound up fitting nicely into the hacker project as well. Plenty of great Hollywood Hacking dialogue (Ving Rhames has "top of the line crypto"), but the iconic CIA break-in scene where Cruise rappels down into an ultra-secure computer lab has an air of Truth Through Fiction to it. The team has to employ social engineering (poisoning the technician with security access), gain physical access to the terminal, learn his password, and manually access the information. De Palma nails the suspense of the scene too, and there's this 2001 surreal quality to the blinding white tube of a set and the silent descent.
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