Mission: Impossible<\/em>, however, seems to split the difference between franchise norms. The only constant presence in every single entry is producer and star Tom Cruise and his character, IMF agent Ethan Hunt. Although the series has expanded its ensemble of recurring characters with Ethan\u2019s team of Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), and Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), and has demonstrated acknowledgment of its past by bringing back people like Kittridge (Henry Czerny), who hasn\u2019t been seen since the first film, the series is not a character study. Seven movies in and we only know so much about these people, a fact that Dead Reckoning<\/em> uses to its advantage by introducing a heretofore unseen character and plot elements from deep in Ethan\u2019s past before he joined the IMF, a development that another franchise wouldn\u2019t be able to insert as smoothly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Put simply, the Mission: Impossible<\/em> franchise is a series of films about complication, mystery, misdirection, and obfuscation that revels in confounding audiences, and keeping them at an emotional arm\u2019s length. In the M:I<\/em> films, any scene could turn out to be a ruse, any character has the potential to be revealed as someone else entirely, and so on. That certainly sounds pretty fitting for a franchise about spies based on a television show developed and aired during the Cold War, yet the original 1966-1973 CBS series\u2019 focus was less on mystery and more on what the title promised: heroes (of vaguely Western origin\/affiliation) overcoming adversity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the show\u2019s executive producer, Bruce Geller,<\/a> the series was to concern \u201cthe Everyman-superman\u201d and be an \u201chomage to teamwork and good old Yankee ingenuity.\u201d Instead of featuring recurring characters with rich backstories whose arcs would develop over multiple episodes of the show, Geller had an eye on the series\u2019 longevity by making it resemble a \u201cproblem of the week\u201d procedural, something that any viewer could pick up or put down at any moment. Toby Miller wrote that the series\u2019 characters were \u201cfigures performing humanness, infinitely plastic, and ready to be redisposed in a moment,\u201d postulating that the series\u2019 healthy run (which included a revival from 1988-1990) was due to \u201cthis decentred, subjectless approach.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When filmmaker Brian De Palma was approached by Cruise to make the first Mission: Impossible<\/em> movie, the director\u2019s ingenious sense of subversion pounced on that idea of characters \u201cready to be redisposed in a moment,\u201d famously beginning his movie adaptation by killing off Ethan\u2019s entire IMF team, something we later learn was the doing of Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), the only holdover character from the TV show (where he was portrayed by Peter Graves). Mission: Impossible<\/em> is undoubtedly a Cruise vanity project insofar as he\u2019s present in just about every scene of the film and has the most character development, but the actor earns that vanity by his intense commitment to the role and playing Ethan as both a seasoned professional and a morally outraged innocent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Right from the first movie, the M:I<\/em> recipe was something of a stew: as Cruise admits in this clip<\/a>, he and De Palma were pitching each other bravura suspense setpieces without knowing the entire plot of the script yet, and even Cruise\u2019s audio commentary with director Christopher McQuarrie for the 2018 sixth installment, Fallout<\/em>, has them admitting they went into production without a finished script (a tradition that very much continues with Dead Reckoning<\/em>, according to its stars<\/a>). In that light, it\u2019s no wonder that the franchise was browbeaten from the start for being obtuse; Roger Ebert\u2019s review of the 1996 film began<\/a>, \u201cI\u2019m not sure I could pass a test on the plot of Mission: Impossible<\/em>. My consolation is that the screenwriters probably couldn\u2019t, either.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just a sentence later, however, Ebert concedes that the plot\u2019s intricate workings are not the film\u2019s main focus. Initially, Ebert\u2019s assessment that Mission: Impossible<\/em> was more aesthetically-minded was fairly on the money: the initial plan Cruise seemed to have for the franchise (after De Palma turned down returning for a sequel) was for its aesthetics to change with every installment, to be a director-driven series not unlike the Alien<\/em> films had been. Thus, we received John Woo\u2019s operatic M:I-2<\/em>, J.J. Abrams\u2019 slick and savvy M:I-III<\/em>, and Brad Bird\u2019s kinetic Ghost Protocol.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n McQuarrie\u2019s tenure on the series disproves what once was an easy answer for Mission: Impossible<\/em>\u2019s longevity: that its revolving cast of characters and directors afforded something for everyone as well as a freshness each time out the style of the James Bond series. Sure, some folks have used this opportunity to complain anew that the series is much ado about nothing, and McQuarrie has certainly had to go out of his way to course correct a few continuity bumps. One of those bumps was the character of Ethan\u2019s ex-wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who was introduced in M:I-III<\/em> and then was missing for the majority of Ghost Protocol<\/em>, save a cameo at the end of that installment that was intended as a send-off but was misinterpreted by enough people that her absence in Rogue Nation<\/em> was noted. Fallout<\/em> not only drew clearer lines around the character and her and Ethan\u2019s relationship, it also underlined Ethan\u2019s character as someone who refuses to let his team die ever again, to value one life over millions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/mission-impossible-ghost-protocol-cast-1024x683.jpg\")
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However, with McQuarrie\u2019s first official at-bat in the director\u2019s chair, 2015\u2019s Rogue Nation<\/em>, the series took a turn back to its tonal Alfred Hitchcock\/Carol Reed origins, revisiting De Palma\u2019s brand of moral ambiguity and paranoia. It refused to leave the prior few entries behind entirely, though, congealing their contributions into sequences of bravura, practical stuntwork, a good deal of which is performed by Cruise. As McQuarrie and Cruise\u2019s collaboration deepened and continued, resulting in McQuarrie returning for Fallout<\/em> and Dead Reckoning Part One<\/em>, the director has taken the opportunity afforded him by the first half of the franchise, switching up his style and tone while keeping an emphasis on dialogue, structure, and practical feats of derring-do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n