Month: September 2003

X2 comes out on DVD on 25 November. The DVD is getting good marks in preview. Cool beans.

Rewatched (in the background) Mission: Impossible, the original 1996 (!) Tom Cruise flick, while Katherine was a pre-school today (as background to my getting lots of telecommuting work done, of course).

The Good

• Though plenty of folks critique the plot as being too complicated, that’s about the only thing (other than window dressing) that gets brought over from the original series, which were always about convoluted plots (how much simpler the IMF team’s job would be if they were just allowed to use a nice sniper rifle …). The plot is complex, but pretty much everything gets explained at the end, without too many seams showing.

• The cast is a good one. Cruise plays a wonderfully intense Ethan Hunt. The caper ensembles — both of them, in fact — work well together. Vanessa Redgrave’s work is enjoyable.

• Danny Elfman’s score is perfect, one of the best he’s done, in fact. That they went to the cost of bringing in and using to good effect the Schifrin theme (unlike some other big-budget TV remakes) was an excellent decision. I could almost have wished they’d used some of the TV incidental themes, but I wouldn’t pass up Elfman’s work, either.

The Bad

• The film sets up Kittridge as an obnoxious, overbearing Control, lacking only twirling moustachios to come off as the main bad guy. Yet, in the end, not only does he turn out to be right in all but his (understandable) suspicion of Hunt, but he plays a key role in the final defeat of the bad guys.

• Gratuitous romance between Ethan and Claire, and gratuitous violent end of same.

• The computer interfaces are beautiful to behold — but unnecessarily so. These things don’t need to be visually exciting; indeed, that robs them of some of their verisimilitude.

• The computer stuff hasn’t held up well in general. Granted that it was probably written in 1995, the inclusion of actual technologies in the film (Oooooh, a “686 prototype,” you say?) immediately dates it in a way that very little else does.

The Ugly

• Jim Phelps would never, ever do that. Never. Ever. Forget it. Assume he’s a clone, or an evil twin, or something like that. Never. Ever.

• Gratuitous actor-getting-spiked-through-the-eye shot. (Though I do wonder why, evidently, Emilio Estevez wasn’t credited with the role.)

An enjoyable flick, overall, moreso now that I’m doing the Spycraft game.

(I’ve never seen the sequel, though from what I understand, it suffered from “sequelitis,” where the three “best” things in the original are extracted, cranked up to 11, and shoved into a new plot, usually with dismal results. Still, I guess it did well enough to warrent a third outing next year.)