Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation vs. Mission: Impossible

2 comments

2 comments

Rogue Nation beats the one that started it all.

I'm the kind of guy who likes the first film of a series the best most of the time. Rogue Nation is the third sequel that I prefer to the original one. It's crazy that the series is going stronger than ever after 5 films.

The first. Easy choice. The series is very strong for the action genre but Brian De Palma's pervasive presence in the first makes it even more enjoyably read and experienced as one of the highlights of his directorial canon than as merely a blockbuster that kicked off a great action series. And this is not fanboy bullshit. If you are familiar but haven't even thought about it, watch it as a De Palma film and you'll find that much more than his supposed director for hire hits like the Untouchables and Scarface, Mission Impossible hits every characteristic obsession and device, Hitchcockian homages and inventive film grammar--split screen, inner thought intercuts during conversation, gadget geeks and femme fatales that one would associate with his suspense genre masterpieces "Blow Out", "Dressed to Kill", "Obsession", "Body Doubly". "Raising Cain" and more recently, "Passion". You know, when the film was released, it was notoriously supposed to be very difficult to follow and the years have been kind to the film to the extent that more modern audiences do not have as nearly so hard a time following it. This is a sure sign that the film was far ahead of its time but I would go further. De Palma actually pushed the entire genre towards treating its audience with more respect and introduced techniques and grammar into a more popular format that became so universally and quickly accepted that audiences now wouldn't quite understand why Mission Impossible was so hard to follow by typical audience members when it debuted. The entire opening is a sly illusion if very different variation on what Hitchcock did with Psycho on the very basic level of killing off his main character. No, Tom Cruise doesn't die but Mission Impossible was a TV series about teams and De Palma kills the entire team and every star other than Cruise at the end of the first act just as Hitchock killed Janet Leigh at the end of Psycho's first act. Characters do come back but it's easily overlooking on subsequent viewings or just in hindsight how powerful and daring a move that was to start the film. Also, in typical De Palma fashion, It's most famous sequence is a blatant reproduction and topping of Topkapi's museum sequence but it's just one of several great standout sequences. Who could forget the aquarium restaurant that explodes Cruise towards the screen onto the city streets? Or the train sequence at the end which has been copied so many times since but not topped. For some reason, Tarantino, who adores De Palma, is properly credited for these kind of things but De Palma deserves the respect as well and Mission Impossible is just way better than something like Rogue Nation if you take it seriously as a film.

It's not often that sequel is better than the original, but it's the case here. Rogue Nation for the win.

Mission Impossible 4, 5, 3, 1, 2.

MI is a better version 3 and RN is a lesser version of GP.