In September 1966, Desilu Productions—known for launching The Twilight Zone and then Star Trek—ventured into the world of high-stakes international espionage drama with a little show called Mission: Impossible. With a team initially led by Daniel Briggs (Steven Hill, best known as Sam Waterston’s boss on early seasons of Law & Order), their job was doing the impossible: acquiring stolen information, setting up a dictator, and so on. Peter Graves (as Jim Phelps) took over in the second season, steering the team (with regulars including Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Greg Morris, Peter Lupus, and Leonard Nimoy) through these incredible adventures until 1973.
In those days, the “adventure” was finding a way to outsmart the bad guys, using their vanity, arrogance, pride or other character flaws against them with an array of disguises, bravado, and technology only hinted at in the contemporaneous James Bond films. (“Do they really have bugs/doodads/gimmicks that will do that?” was a common question of the day.) Phelps and his team had to be smarter, faster, and more willing to take risks than was safe; because of the risks–and the possibility that their operation would cause an international incident—the IM Force would be “disavowed” (left for dead, basically) if they were caught.
When Mission: Impossible came to the big screen in 1996, with Tom Cruise as young agent Ethan Hunt, it was a new day. Spy thrillers had evolved; Bond was as much a special ops soldier as a spy and the bad guys often knew the other player well before arriving on the scene. Mission: Impossible kept up by killing off the old guard and beginning an era where the best of the past—the disguises, the subterfuges, the quick-changes and high tech—was retained while infusing a huge dose of slam-bang action. The tone was also more cynical, with a strong distrust of authority now woven into the fabric from day one.
Hollywood was quick to notice. The Bourne Identity launched Matt Damon‘s thriller franchise, with an even greater focus on action over traditional spycraft, though to be fair Bourne was more of a covert ops hitman than a spy. (Interestingly enough, Damon’s movie was a remake as well.)
So the lines got blurred. Hunt and his team did some old-fashioned spy work but often had to take action in the field when things went wrong; where the old team would have relied on fast-talking and maybe some knockout drops in the bad guy’s martini, Hunt and the others did a lot of running, shooting, punching, and blowing stuff up. They also regularly faced opposition, if not outright hostility, from their own organization, with Hunt and crew battling government operatives as often as their targets. Plus there was considerable corruption, an element of “who can you trust?” that didn’t exist in the more innocent times of the original series.
Now the eighth movie in the series has come and we can look back, take stock, and think about how Mission: Impossible, and spy movies generally, have evolved since their Cold War origins. Do we want “spy” movies or do we want gunfights, car chases, improbable weapons built into clothing and vehicles, and ever-more-convoluted plots to save the world? Well, if the success of FINAL RECKONING is any indication, the answer appears to be yes to the latter. While I (grouchy old timer that I might be) enjoy the clever slow-burn of an ingenious plan coming together and paying off unexpectedly, I can admit to enjoying the fireworks and death-defying stunts of the new generation of movies as well.
It may not be “your grandfather’s spy adventure” nowadays, but the new stuff is plenty enjoyable. That said, you youngsters, it wouldn’t hurt you to look up the original Mission: Impossible, four seasons of which (Seasons 1-4) are available on Paramount+. It’s pretty good too.
