Retrospective: Mission Impossible (1996) (Patreon)

The fall of the Berlin Wall was a brilliant stroke of luck that spy thrillers ever got. For roughly half a century, spy thrillers were a politically vital genre, weaving countless classics about the epochal battle between capitalism and communism. Geniuses like Graham Greene, John le Carré, and Ian MacKintosh built their reputations on Cold War spy stories. In other words, the espionage world was in danger of becoming a subject like any other, something people could tell stories about and critique. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Capitalist Realism protected spy thrillers — ultimately a Western, CIA and MI6-administered project — from the threat of an actual adversary like the Soviet Union. The spy world created the 21st Century — just read Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars to see how the C.I.A.’s covert operations in Afghanistan during the 1980s led to 9/11. We all live in the spy world now, a nightmare that Greene, le Carré, and MacKintosh could never have envisioned.

The longevity of Mission: Impossible is symptomatic of how secure spy stories are now. Certainly Mission: Impossible is more secure than James Bond (since 2010, there have been three Bond films and four Mission: Impossible ones, with another one scheduled for next year). Bond, with his MI6 origins, hasn’t quite managed to lose the chains of the Cold War, whereas M:I is fanciful enough to pass in any era.

But the first film, Brian de Palma’s Mission: Impossible, comes at one of the most interesting moments in spy thrillers’ history. In the mid-90s, Mission: Impossible and GoldenEye changed the game of the genre. Both films revived seemingly dead spy franchises after the end of the Cold War. They both use Cold War imagery to reflect a divided post-Soviet West, specifically in intelligence agencies at war with themselves. And both films are successful, simultaneously avoiding excessive nostalgia without embracing postmodern cynicism. And they’re utterly fanciful, doing their best to avoid concrete geopolitics with any sort of real world consequences.

Mission: Impossible courts the Cold War spy thriller off the bat. The first act is a blatant lift from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, with an intelligence officer leading an operation in Prague that goes horribly wrong and leads to his entire network of agents getting blown. There’s none of the grit of le Carré (or his cynicism), but ripping off the first act of the greatest spy novel ever written is a sign the movie knows what it’s doing (along with the fact they got Brian fucking de Palma to do a Mission: Impossible movie).

There’s other bits of le Carré in here: a war with one’s own agency, disillusionment with Cold War ethics, and an old hero becoming a turncoat. It’s hardly a brilliant action movie, but it’s smarter than it gets credit for. Oh, and the Langley heist is terrific.