mission: impossible - rogue nation, or everybody loves chris
in which tom finds a friend
Hold on, folks. We’re getting a transmission.
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is a flawed movie with a relatively weak plot and villain, but it achieves almost all of what it set out to do in considerable style, with original and inventive action that’s enhanced by decent thematic depth and a terrific female lead. It’s one of the best action movies this summer, proving that this veteran franchise still has plenty of gas in the tank – as long as Tom Cruise is still willing to perform utterly insane daredevil stunts, it’s hard to see Mission: Impossible fading into obscurity any time soon.
Holy shit, it’s me again?! Damn! I can’t escape this guy!
16-year-old me, armed with a thesaurus and undiagnosed anxiety, came to cook. I told you guys back in Ghost Protocol that my writing skill topped out at this point. There’s nothing I can do here, except to disavow the word “terrific” and cast shade on my then-obsession with “thematic depth”. Sometimes you just have to admit when somebody’s doing your job for you, and when that somebody is you from seven years ago. I have been shadow-boxed by myself, and I have lost.
The villain, Solomon Lane, is admittedly an improvement over the non-entity that Ghost Protocol coughed up by virtue of receiving some relatively original motivations and stronger characterisation but Lane doesn’t get enough screen-time for his character arc to truly register,
Nah. I chose to shit on Sean Harris? Nobody does that. Nobody gets to shit on Sean Harris. That’s my guy right there. 2015 Louis didn’t know shit. That guy was a fucking idiot. I’m smarter now. The only progress I make in life is forwards, baby.
Welcome to Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. I wasn’t in therapy when it came out, but I am now, and that’s what matters.
The year is 2015. Not much time has passed since Edge of Tomorrow. We sure took care of a lot of context last week, didn’t we?
I guess it bears pointing out, since we went long on 2014’s unusually good blockbuster slate, that the summer of 2015 was weird. A couple of incredible movies, like Mad Max: Fury Road and Inside Out, are fighting for air against the unfortunate bunch that is Avengers: Age of Ultron, Jurassic World, Terminator Genisys, Fantastic Four, Ted 2, Pixels -
You know, Pixels. The last line of its Wikipedia synopsis (spoilers) is “A year later, Lady Lisa and Ludlow marry and have Q*Bert-like children.”
Kevin James plays the President of the United States.
Brian Cox does this.
Anyhow. Just a footnote for you there.
We’re not here to talk about Pixels, though. We are here to talk about a man.
Tom Cruise.
No. Not Tom Cruise. Well, in a lot of ways, always Tom Cruise, but less so this time.
Instead, we are here to discuss the American film director, producer and screenwriter Christopher “Chris” (no middle name) McQuarrie. We’ve talked some fairly major directors in this series right now, folk with an indelible impact on popular culture Western and Eastern alike, but all of them are little chump babies compared to Our Chris. Frankly, they mean nothing in comparison.
John Woo? Brian De Palma? Cinematic masters, you might say. Well, I don’t. I think they’re fucking small time, frankly. They only directed one Mission: Impossible movie. Christopher McQuarrie, once all is said and done, will have directed four of them, with a significant role in writing another. Aside from Tom Cruise, he is the creative kingpin of the Mission franchise. Nobody means shit next to Chris.
And yet, not that many people seem interested in writing about it. If I had a motivation in writing this series, aside from bringing my deranged parasocial projections to another bizarre Hollywood celebrity, it was to shine a light on our Chris. He is a director, I think, whose contributions to American action cinema are entirely under-discussed. We accept as read that Tom Cruise is a seminal movie figure, but we tend to breeze quickly over the guy with whom Cruise has had the longest and most prolific creative collaboration.
No more, I say. No more.
McQ had a roundabout way towards becoming Tom Cruise’s number one boy. He began his career as a screenwriter with two collaborations with disgraced pervert and utter monster Bryan Singer.
Oh. Record scratch there, huh? Yeah. It’s worth not breezing over that, either. McQuarrie’s highest profile Singer link-up came early on, but he renewed the partnership in 2013 with some writing work on the non-existent movie Jack the Giant Slayer, by which time rumours and reports of Singer’s misconduct had already begun to trickle out. This is a man we should be careful to valorize. In its own way, it’s fitting that Cruise’s latter-day life partner would be a complicated figure to discuss.
How else are you going to belong in Cruiseworld?
The highest profile of those collaborations would be the second, The Usual Suspects, for which McQuarrie won the Oscar for Original Screenplay, and which co-stars Kevin Spacey just to put a fine point on that moral uncertainty. He then had a busy 2000, where he released his directorial feature The Way of the Gun, and performed a major uncredited rewrite on Singer’s X-Men, before vanishing for eight years, much like Gene Cousineau after he shot his son.
Barry spoilers, sorry.
It was McQ’s return from the wilderness that really laid the path down to Mission. He wrote and produced Singer’s mid-budget Nazi thriller Valkyrie in 2008, which just so happened to be one of those middlingly-received projects one Thomas Cruise was participating in between Missions three and four.
Evidently, some kind of meet cute happened, because from there Cruise and McQuarrie couldn’t keep their hands off each other. McQuarrie’s next directorial feature would be Jack Reacher, an adaptation utterly scorned by fans for casting tiny man Cruise as a character whose entire personality is “tall”, but which did pretty well otherwise. In the meantime, he kept up the script doctoring work, sprucing up the scripts for none other than Ghost Protocol and Edge of Tomorrow.
Hey, that’s us!
His Cruise credentials ran deep, but McQuarrie really established his specific rep on those last two mentioned movies: he was the writing fixer, the clean-up man you call to keep your spiralling script in order.
On Ghost Protocol, he performed a major on-set rewrite that seems to have reshuffled many of the details around Jeremy Renner’s character, simplifying the mystery of what he was up to - and like with X-Men, the work went uncredited. He joined the writing team on Edge before filming began, but not much before, and was credited with finding the slapstick aspects in the movie’s premise (otherwise known as some of the best bits!). Also, most importantly for later, he helped director Doug Liman figure out a new ending on the fly, when the decision was made to begin filming without a completed third act.
Look, it’s stressful enough to rewrite a film on set. Blockbuster history is littered with car-crash examples of scripts that were taken out of the oven before they were fully cooked. When you add the presence of Tom Cruise, a man who - and this may come as a shock to some - can be intense and difficult - to the equation, it begins to look like a situation that is not for the faint of heart.
It’s therefore not unsurprising that when Cruise and Paramount went shopping for a new director for the fifth Mission, there was one man they had in mind: the steady pair of hands who not only knew how to deal with the stresses of a fast-moving blockbuster, but in fact specialised in them.
As we’ve covered, Mission directors are typically random Hollywood figures that Cruise was interested in at the time, and has otherwise had no real history with McQuarrie was the first Mission director to have collaborated extensively with Cruise before, which might have signalled that things were a little different this time.
With the benefit of hindsight, Rogue Nation now clearly marks the beginning of the second half of this series. The different-director anthology approach was over, donezo. The franchise would, and likely never will, hire someone else to direct a franchise instalment. It had found its guy.
What exactly is Christopher McQuarrie’s aesthetic as a director? What are his interests?
These are questions you could broadly answer of the four directors who had worked on the franchise before. De Palma liked cool and classical filmmaking, Woo liked insane action melodrama and Bird liked jaunty retro men-on-a-mission vibes. Even the odd one out, J.J. Abrams - a man who would reveal himself in time to have no overriding creative vision beyond uncritical nostalgia - brought a recognisable sleek spy-chic thing from his previous TV work to III.
McQuarrie had directed two films before this - a Western and a grittier-than-usual Cruise star vehicle, alongside putting his pen to a variety of projects. There’s not a great deal of overlap between any of it. The best grand theory of McQuarrie, and it’s pretty rudimentary, is that he’s a classic journeyman who plays well with others and knows how to tailor his approach to prominent franchises or movie stars. In essence, he’s the reverse of most of the major creative voices who had previously worked on Mission.
You can start to see here why McQuarrie boarding the franchise represented a change in how Cruise and the powers that be - but really, just Cruise - wanted Mission to be. Change was the name of the game with the franchise, of course, with none of the instalments having much of anything to do with one another, but that changeability represented its own kind of consistency. Now, by hiring a reliable franchise man, Cruise was bringing in change through a new consistency.
Does that make any sense at all? It’s like one of those “predictability unpredictable” word puzzles. Sometimes I forget that these newsletters have to make sense for other people.
The number one sign that Rogue Nation is a McQuarrie joint is that the production quietly slipped into chaos late in the game. The number two sign was that that chaos was barely noticeable in the final product.
Originally, the movie was scheduled for a Christmas 2015 release date, and began filming in the late summer of 2014 with that in mind. Then, slap bang in the middle of production, Paramount decided to yoink the film out of that holiday berth and moved it ahead to the end of July, five months earlier than planned.
(In retrospect, this would be the ideal decision, given the movie avoided Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which was slightly successful at the box office.)
Tight enough, right? No. With time and budget running low, there were only ten days left to shoot a climax and no idea about what that climax would be. The result was a juicy Hollywood Reporter story in February about how the movie had shut down filming so McQuarrie, Cruise and a mysteriously unnamed writer friend could crack how to finish the story without the money or time to shoot a major action sequence. Five months out from release? That’s what you call squeaky bum time, folks.
(Fun fact for you: this was an almost identical quandary faced by Spectre, which was also facing a tight filming schedule. The difference is that the third act of Spectre sucks.)
That’s the McQuarrie touch.
So, you know how I ended last week’s newsletter by confidently calling this the best Mission yet?
I mean. I think it is? It probably is. It’s just that I put a little too much sauce on that proclamation. I was a little too excitable. I understand now what it was like to put your money in crypto when it seemed like a growth market.
No, that’s an exaggeration. This movie isn’t crypto. I’m actually quite sorry to Rogue Nation for the comparison.
The point being, I am here, humbling myself before you, my readers, and telling you that I was a little hasty. Rogue Nation isn’t definitively the best Mission to date.
But it’s still pretty great.
The first two sequences lay down the gauntlet nicely. In the first, McQuarrie casually throws out the big stunt that was the centrepiece of marketing in the form of Cruise hanging to a plane as it takes off, making very clear he’s uninterested in the viewer wondering how this one is going to top the Burj Khalifa stunt. The man only competes with himself. In the second, Alec Baldwin and Jeremy Renner yak it up in front of a Senate committee, and it’s a familiar spiel thinly justifying another “IMF goes rogue” storyline - but wait! Alec Baldwin is pointing to TVs showing the aftermath of the missile strike from Ghost Protocol! He’s talking what happened in the last movie! Gasp!
Sure, Ghost Protocol had the running thread about where Michelle Monaghan had gone, but it was still broadly a clean wipe of the slate. This, on the other hand, is straightforward sequel stuff. You’re left in no doubt that these movies have continuity now. The fact that characters both remember and discuss what happened last movie is practically a revolution for the franchise. It’s also a direct fulfilment of the promise made by McQuarrie’s hiring.
Why hire a pliable journeyman with little distinct aesthetic or perspective? If your goal is to create a unique tone for each instalment of your franchise-slash-anthology, that’s a bad movie. If your goal is now to create an actual aesthetic for your franchise, to codify what a Mission: Impossible movie is supposed to look like and feel like and what it’s supposed to be about - well, that journeyman now seems like an excellent choice.
So it goes with McQuarrie, whose cribs a little from pretty much every prior Mission director’s approach here. The slick procedural thrills and twisty espionage plot riff on De Palma, the presence of Baldwin as a Javert type hunting Hunt from behind a screen-plastered office is very Abrams, and there’s still a decent helping of jaunty heist japes to show that there’s a Bird still in the system. Sadly, as indicated by general absence of doves and of turn of the century metal, John Woo’s vibe isn’t really visible here, but it would have been kind of weird if it had been. It’s an acquired taste.
To address the spectre of Fast Five that always haunts us - that particular ‘part five’ revitalised the franchise by adopting a completely different genre and throwing the fully collected ensemble cast into it. It was a great move for the moment, but it also cornered the Fast franchise into an escalating absurdity that ultimately saw it lose its sense of itself.
By contrast, Rogue Nation is absolutely within the same wheelhouse of what came before, and consciously builds from all of it. It solidifies what had been mere suggestion before, whether in terms of tone or character dynamics or who the hell Ethan Hunt is meant to be, and it creates a nice and sustainable foundation for the series going forwards. For my A Level Government & Politics heads, this is the benefits of adopting a codified constitution. Sometimes, it’s helpful to have something more concrete than just vibes.
What’s in this new-model Mission formula?
Stunts are in. Stunts couldn’t be more in. In fact, it’s abundantly clear that McQuarrie and Cruise’s main creative intention in making these movies is a kind of masochistic self-oneupmanship - pushing the needle closer and closer towards death. It’s very Edge of Tomorrow, actually, this casting of Tom Cruise as meat puppet edging death. He’s clinging to a plane! He’s holding his breath underwater for six minutes! He’s jumping off an opera house with a thin rope connected to a loose pipe! He’s ski-jumping a courtesy car backwards into a car park! Look at him go! Look how fragile our bodies are!
Reader, it’s fun as hell. No bones about it. It’s all part of the enjoyable reframing of Ethan Hunt as an inhuman man, separate from you or I. No challenge can faze him. His heart stops for like thirty seconds during this movie, and it’s just a minor inconvenience. He is a being of pure intention, a man capable only of moving in a straight line towards a prescribed destination he will always reach. He is… how do you say it? Any tips, Alec Baldwin?
This line is so rad, but what makes it even radder is that Baldwin is addressing a character who is actually Ethan Hunt in disguise and will dramatically rip off his mask to reveal that fact immediately afterwards. God, yes. Cinema is so beautiful.
It takes the ideas Ghost Protocol was playing with, and makes it text. If your action hero is no longer recognisable as human, you might as well lean into the skid, and there is no way to lean further into the skid than to call your character “the living manifestation of destiny”.
Speaking of characters - here’s an actual one they found.
Hooray! A real woman!
Look, it’s not that nobody ever tried. Thandiwe Newton and Maggie Q and Michelle Monaghan and Paula Patton all did their best. It’s just that the movies they were in weren’t particularly on their side. Even if they got a few fun action beats (well, only Maggie Q and Patton, but anyhow) to enjoy, that would come at the cost of actual dimensionality. Thinking of the time dedicated to uplifting and platforming Simon Pegg across these films and then comparing that to what Paula Patton got - it’s not flattering to the movies.
(I like Simon Pegg in these movies, okay? He’s fun. He knows what kind of blockbuster he’s in. It’s just that his character has the vibe of a kid who wished to be Tom Cruise’s friend and then kept on pushing his luck and making further wishes when that one came true. No offence to Benji Dunn, but the guy has had some lucky breaks.)
Finally, though, Tom Cruise names a woman for $1. The woman’s name is Rebecca Ferguson, and she is good. Actually, she is very good. She fits into the franchise with an ease that makes clear she’s going to be around for quite a while, and the script finally allows for somebody to exist as a significant presence in the drama and action besides Cruise. It’s an excellent choice.
It’s true that Ilsa Faust is almost incomprehensible as a character, her double-triple crossing motivations a baffling squiggle, but that’s okay. Actually, it kind of fits the vibe. As a character, Ilsa has an only-in-a-movie unreality that makes her an ideal screen partner for the equally not-real Ethan Hunt. It’s another tick in the column of Rogue Nation embracing the franchise’s inherent artifice rather than cluttering itself with worries about psychological realism.
Okay, Ilsa works, but the whole narrative framework around her… doesn’t, really. I dinged Ghost Protocol for offering a wafer-thin level of dramatic intrigue, and I’m going to be a total fusspot by criticising this movie for having the opposite problem. This thing is dense; McQuarrie and Drew Pearce’s script is weighted with a spy novel’s worth of backstory and tangled motivations. Aiming for le Carré ain’t a bad idea, but it’s a little hard to pull off that vibe if 50% of your movie is reserved for Tom Cruise’s Stunt Hour. As it is, all the intrigue is garbled and confusing and teeters on the edge of incoherence.
It’s okay. It doesn’t really matter. Only to purist dickheads like me, anyway. Here’s something this movie does have in common with II: it is overwhelmingly vibes-based. All the secret ledger Syndicate talk makes my head hurt, but that’s subordinate to the cool vibes of Sean Harris rasping about new world orders and Alec Baldwin doing a Javert thing that is so committed to its self-serious stupidity that it somehow works. Narrative coherence is a sacrifice, but we do get sheer cool as a substitute. There are worse trades.
Maybe I overrated Rogue Nation a little, but it’s hard not to look back on it kindly. Its faults are forgivable, all the more so because we know that this was only McQuarrie’s first crack of the whip. He was trying some stuff out, and that’s okay. It’s all a learning experience, and any learning experience is worth it if you apply those lessons next time around.
So, did McQuarrie do that? Did he focus on what went right, and iron out what went wrong? Given the first second chance in the entire franchise, did he take advantage?
Next time: Hell yes.
We’re at our final Mission to date in our penultimate newsletter. Mission: Impossible - Fallout is a glorious action masterclass that showed Hollywood how it was done, and strapped rocket boots to Cruise’s unlikely late-game career resurgence. It’s the best one of these.
Yeah. I’m risking it on that.