Given the direction the Mission Impossible franchise has taken over the last twenty two years, all the way through to the most recent sixth outing Fallout, it is easy to forget Brian De Palma’s original but also to underestimate quite how well it launched one of Hollywood’s most impressively consistent franchises.
Mission Impossible happened just before cinema began to change. It happened just before the post-modernist transformation of Hollywood into a self-referential field of franchises that would go on to metaphorically eat themselves, in the wake of Wes Craven’s Scream and a thousand imitators.
It happened in advance of the rise of the blockbuster which did not rely on the tentpole, marquee name to keep afloat, as The Matrix sequels gave way to the first flourish of the comic-book movie rise across the 2000’s. It happened in the midst of the trend of classic properties being revisited, updated and ‘reimagined’, which began dominating the landscape, coming in the wake of successes such as The Fugitive.
Mission Impossible, quite remarkably for a picture which is now two decades old, feels as a result both uniquely rooted in the 1990’s and decidedly out of time.
Continue reading “Franchise Retrospective: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996)”
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