Mission: Impossible (1996) First Time Watching! Full Movie Reaction!!
Added 2025-12-30 18:47:34 +0000 UTC
Comments
That was a good revisit, not having watched it for many years. The original TV series was a real groundbreaker back in the 60s. It was the kind of thing people would wait for weekly, and talk about in the days that followed.
David Wilkins
2026-01-03 20:54:51 +0000 UTCI've seen the first couple seasons of the original tv show and it's really fun. It's like if Ocean's 11 were spies. It's all about the mind games and heist style plans with very little combat/gunfights. The first season starred Steven Hill (DA Adam Schiff for the first 10 seasons of Law and Order), but from season 2 onwards Peter Graves starred as Jim Phelps. The main element that separates the show from the movies is that the show is 100% a team effort. Phelps might be the team leader but he's not above the rest of the cast unlike the movies where Cruise is always number one. M:I 1 has a special place in my heart. I discovered it on television as a kid and I became obsessed. It was the first proper spy movie I had ever seen. Outside of the finale there isn't really any action, all the setpieces are built on suspense. I was already a James Bond fan at the time so it just cemented my love for twisty spy stories/thrillers. It had such a distinctive visual style too (which I later learned came from being a De Palma movie). All those dutch angles, those POV shots, those split diopters and that Danny Elfman score. Might be my favourite of his score. I love how he rearranged the Mission Impossible theme and integrated what I later learned was another theme from the tv show called "The Plot" (it plays multiple times, but a big one is when they unscrew the vent). For Christmas 1999, my granddad gave me 25 bucks and I asked my mum to use the money to buy me the VHS tape. Mission: Impossible is the first movie I ever bought ( though I'm sure my mum had to fork out some more cash for that tape lol). My granddad was estranged from the family for years and it was his only Christmas with us. He passed away the following summer so that money was the only Christmas gift he ever gave me. I always treasure the few memories I have of him. I had the chance to go to Prague a couple of years ago with my mum and it was a beautiful city. I visited the Natural History Museum which doubled for the interior of the US Embassy. I walked the shore and went right next to the big wooden door that Sarah and Ethan exited the embassy (in real life it's the Liechtenstein embassy not the USA one). I was in the parking where the car exploded and it still looked the same. I even ran down the stairs like Ethan did :D PS: As a huge Bond fan I would love it if you reacted to them but understand how daunting the series is. There are 25 films total. It's quite a lot. My suggestion would be to divide the series into eras and watch some other franchise between those. I think that at first you could watch them by decade. There were 6 movies made in the 60's then 5 in the 70's and another 5 in the 80's. From the 90's until now 9 movies were made ( 4 starring Pierce Brosnan and 5 with Daniel Craig). So treat the Bond franchise not as one gigantic series but five more manageable series. Space it out over a couple of years if need be. Before the Craig reboot the franchise was very episodic in nature. You won't lose the plot if you take your time. I first watched them in a pretty random order and it's pretty common for Bond fans.
ED209
2026-01-02 08:16:39 +0000 UTCGreat Reaction Guys !! Like your Connection with 3 Days of the Condor!!! I watched this on in the cinema, i like the whole Franchise but this one is my favorite ... De Palma always delivers in the 80's and 90's !!! Please check Out more Jean Reno like "The Crimson Rivers"
Florian Meier
2025-12-31 11:32:06 +0000 UTCI can't believe you guys were completely unaware of the high wire vault sequence. It's been parodied to death. It was too much fun watching it through your eyes. Don't get me wrong, this movie is great. Out of the franchise, it's the most stylish, with a prestigious director Brian De Palma who knows how to use a camera. Also, I must say it's up there in terms of the best looking Tom Cruise has been in a movie. But it also reminds me that this success really changed his career. Tom Cruise was becoming a serious heavyweight actor with Born on the 4th of July (nominated for an Oscar), Rain Man, A Few Good Men. Even Interview with the Vampire was an acting challenge not a summer blockbuster. He still does some remarkable work like in Magnolia and Collateral, but his career became overwhelmed by the Mission: Impossible series. This movie came out in 1996 and the last movie was this year 2025. Maybe no one else cares, but he could've made any movie he wanted, worked with any director he wanted, but it was mostly 30 years of Ethan Hunt.
Ellie Williams
2025-12-31 05:59:14 +0000 UTCWhen I rewatched Three Days of the Condor with you guys I realized how much THIS film was inspired by THAT film.
Jason Dolan
2025-12-31 05:58:04 +0000 UTCIt doesn't matter if you have seen one of them because you're now going to see it IN CONTEXT which is actually I totally new way of seeing it.
Jason Dolan
2025-12-31 05:22:44 +0000 UTCGreat reaction! Glad you both enjoyed it. Just to clarify, when Ethan meets Jim (after the London phone call) and goes through all the possible scenarios, Ethan knows Jim is the mole but is acting (to Jim) that he agrees with Jim that Kittridge is the mole.
Don
2025-12-31 05:04:40 +0000 UTCThis film is the closest you'll get to the 60s TV show, except for the Jim Phelps portion. It must have been a shock to old MI fans to see what happened to his character - it's like finding out Indiana Jones is a Nazi at the end.
Michael SCH
2025-12-31 02:35:25 +0000 UTCBrian De Palma is an auteur thriller director, as evidenced by his camera positioning, lighting, and movement. The Prague scenes are his most subtle directing in the film. For example, the embassy scene with the lifts and the two levels (floor and basement) is shot in an unbroken take, which means they must have built the set to accommodate these camera movements, but you don't notice it - until you do. Of course, the scene inside the security room at Langley is justifiably the most memorable. Stephen H. Burum, the cinematographer, was De Palma's go-to guy since The Untouchables, collaborating on seven of his films, all of which feature spectacular cinematography: Snake Eyes (1998) is his best, most nimble work, but even Mission to Mars (2000) had those incredible, weightless 'dancing' scenes. The only other auteur-type MI film in the series is the next one, directed by John Woo. It's also, unfortunately, the least liked among fans. I thought it was still great even if it's tonally different from the other films. From MI3 onwards, all of them are fantastic action thrillers with out-of-this-world stunts and a consistently high quality of work. There's not much of a director's 'imprint' on them, but they are all massively entertaining. Great reaction, as usual!
Michael SCH
2025-12-31 02:32:34 +0000 UTCOh boy this is gonna be goooooooood
Jason Dolan
2025-12-31 02:26:15 +0000 UTCOne other tiny thing: Sarah dies in the opening because she follows both Ethan's instructions to keep tailing Golitsyn to stop the list from getting out into the open, but she *also* follows Jim's instruction to "cut all radio communication." Still, you put together that Ethan is looking at Jim and verbally claiming to buy Jim's lies, but in his head he's actually envisioning the truth, a sequence that confuses many viewers.
Tyler Foster
2025-12-31 00:40:57 +0000 UTCA couple of other people have explained this without explaining this, so: yes, Mission: Impossible started as a television series that ran from 1966 to 1973. On it, the character of Jim Phelps was the leader of the team, where he was played by Peter Graves, who you'd know as the pilot Clarence Oveur in Airplane! De Palma offered Graves the chance to reprise the role in the movie, where the twist would've been a double twist given this was the hero of the TV show, but Graves refused, because he didn't think it was right for the character to become a turncoat. Still, it technically makes the movie franchise a sequel to the TV series. It's funny that you reference Scream, because both Scream and Mission: Impossible's unceremonious killing of famous cast members is drawing from the same place: Marion Crane's mid-movie death in Psycho. This probably seems more obvious when thinking of Scream, given Psycho is a famous horror movie and Scream is a metacommentary on horror movies, but Brian De Palma is also a huge Hitchcock obsessive. Many of his movies contain references and homages to Hitchcock, and I would definitely put the team's death in that category. I also think you are absolutely right about 3 Days of the Condor. In fact, the first time I watched 3 Days of the Condor when I was a teenager or maybe early 20s, I immediately thought of Mission: Impossible during that opening sequence, one of the first instances I can remember where I was watching an older movie and put together that a newer movie had been paying tribute to it. Later in the series, you will see another visual homage to 3 Days of the Condor, as well as some homages to other similar '70s conspiracy thrillers, such as The Parallax View (1974). The first four Mission: Impossibles followed in the footsteps of the original Alien franchise, where each film was directed by a different filmmaker who was allowed to come in and put their own stamp on the movie, and then the last four were directed by the same filmmaker. The next Mission: Impossible is directed by John Woo. Long ago, Woo's Face/Off lost an action poll by one vote and I think it was on your radar for the future. Might be a good idea to watch Face/Off before you watch the next one so you have a foundation for what a John Woo movie is like. Also, this was the first movie that Cruise produced, and I think he did know and plan on it potentially being a franchise. I doubt he saw it going to eight movies and ending almost 30 years later, but when he started making these, he wasn't really a franchise actor, and even today, off the top of my head, I think the only time he's starred in a sequel to a movie he was in other than the Mission: Impossible movies is Top Gun. He is in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money (1986), a decades-later sequel to the all-time classic Paul Newman movie The Hustler (1961), but that feels like an exception because it's not a sequel to his own movie.
Tyler Foster
2025-12-31 00:38:05 +0000 UTC
