How would you put together a movie version of a popular TV show? Would you modernize it? Or would you somehow tap into nostalgia memories of a program that viewers may not have even seen in some time?

There is a third option, though, which is simply to ignore the show and create a new, different entity. That seems to be the choice of the makers of Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible series. The first one, directed by Brian De Palma, and therefore twisted and dark and obsessed with betrayal between friends, spent a few minutes repudiating the show by turning Jim Phelps, played by Peter Graves from the show’s second season on, into a traitor and killer. No. 2 was a John Woo exercise. Now No. 3, just out on DVD after a recent release to the screens where it “underperformed” by the studio’s standards, serves as an entree for J. J. Abrams into the big screen.

He was probably a good choice. If you aren’t going to truly adapt the source show you can at least adapt a modern equivalent that does its stuff better, i.e., Alias, Abrams chick spy program. It was an excellent show, at least in its first two seasons, and was innovative in its complexity. Plus, it didn’t look or sound like a TV show. In its camerawork, editing, and music, it was more like a movie. So the transition from small to big screen was probably logical for Abrams, who was otherwise distracted by his other hit TV show, Lost. And in any case, Cruise has an eye for, and the clout to work with, the best directors, so his imprimatur is really important to those who have the brains to pay attention to such things.

As many have noted before me, reviving TV shows is a fad in Hollywood, born of the movie industry’s need to offer up material that is somehow familiar to the public. Yet then they go and change the thing. It’s such a confusing hash of influences. One of the most faithful TV show adaptations was The Flintstones, with good physical analogs for the original cartoon characters, is probably the closest adaptation, and that was a yabba dabba dud, a movie that everyone saw and no one liked (which makes it the perfect embodiment of the Houxian Principle, which states that, “Just because a movie made $100 million dollars doesn’t mean that anyone liked it”).

In any case, Cruise’s adaptations have shown a savvy sense of the public’s tastes, which is a hunger for off season Bond films, mainly because the real Bond films are usually bad (until 2006, anyway). Cruise, as I never tire of repeating, is probably one of the great screen stars, and it isn’t an accident. He makes an interesting contrast with Johnny Depp, another great actor, whose choice of directors and projects is quirkier and more personal, and Sean Penn, probably the most overrated actor working, whose taste in projects and directors is appallingly bad. The person who should be in this top three is Robert Downey, Jr., who derailed his own career.

In any case, Abrams turned MI3 into a episode of Alias, with an emphasis on family, on loyalty, and on the conflict between the secret and the public life. Abrams is a master of the highly emotional boy – girl scene (as well as the father-daughter scene, and so on), and with certain very key scenes between Cruise and Michelle Monaghan develop a rapport that remains crucial later when Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is in extreme jeopardy. I thought that MI3 was a terrific film, very well cast and with non-stop well choreographed action.

It’s unfortunate, then, that the special two disc MI3 is rife with terrible supplements that fail to do justice to it as a film. I could fill probably three or more columns with bile born of my mounting rage at the lost opportunities found on contemporary DVDs, of the contempt for the audience represented by most supplements, on the continuing disdain of filmmakers such as De Palma and Spielberg toward commentary tracks, of EPKs tossed in as if they had value as explications du textes. MI3 is a two disc special edition set, but frankly the regular old widescreen edition without the supplemental supplements should be fine for most consumers, as they won’t have their intelligence insulted by the faux extra extras (there is also a full frame edition; does anyone buy these?). DVDs are on the brink of being in trouble. Downloads are easier; there is a lot of bootlegging; the introduction of two new competing high standard formats is confusing and alienating. DVDs are slipping as a buffer zone for studios whose movies are weak at the theaters.

Shared among the three versions of the DVDs are an audio commentary by Cruise and Abrams, deleted scenes, The Making of the Mission, and something called Tribute Montage: Excellence in Film.” Will you life be deprived of unexpected sunshine if you never see or hear these supplements? No. It’s not like missing out on the Peter Ustinov interview on the Criterion Spartacus, which I’ve shown to myself and others over 10 times. Supplements, basically, need to be valuable and entertaining in and of themselves. The five deleted scenes add some nuances, especially about the character Lindsay. The yak track is an excited account of how much fun it was for the duo to work with each other, how much Cruise got hurt making the film (Clooney raised the stakes on that aspect of filmmaking), and some scenes were rejiggered.

Abrams is a master of LA speak. I still recall something he said on the Lost first season making of, in which he said that when he met his collaborator on the show, they were so compatible that he was “mad that I hadn’t met him before this.” In the MI “making of” he is adept at praising everyone else in very specific ways that sound both true and false at the same time. The final supplement on the first disc is a nine minute anthology of Cruise movie clips (unsurprisingly Kidman free) originally screened when Cruise won a British film award. I liked it because it affirmed Cruise’s range and film wit.

Except for one or two brief elements, the supplements on disc two are totally useless. “Mission Action: Inside the Action Unit,” “Visualizing the Mission,”
“Inside the IMF,” and “Launching the Mission” are either for kids or morons, if not to fulfill some contractual agreement that stipulates that everyone associated with the movie gets 15 seconds of “making of” fame. “Mission: Metamorphosis” is about the making of the film’s mask sequence and is slightly interesting, and “Scoring the Mission” is about the film’s music, and that’s almost always of some value, but “Moviefone Unscripted” is an embarrassing throwaway, and “Tribute Montage: Generation: Cruise” essentially repeats the same thing from the first disc. Finally there is a photo gallery and trailers. None of the things that used to be on DVDs in abundance, such as isolated music tracks and complete screenplays, are bothered with anymore. It’s too “technical,” I guess, too “geeky” or “fannish,” and alienates the ordinary fucking people presumed to be the main consumers of DVDs now. The format is too popular for it to escape descending into condescending mediocrity.

MI3 comes in a terrific widescreen transfer (2.35:1 enhanced), with a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track. The special edition retails for $34.95 and hit the street October 30th, 2006.

Since Paramount owns the Mission Impossible franchise, the studio is also able to release the first season of the TV show. In total it consisted of seven seasons and a two season revival series, but with Cruise divorced from Paramount it is unclear if there will be a fourth movie from him for the studio, so for further MI joneses, Paramount may have to relay on the six or eight remaining TV seasons.

Seeing the show again after all these years offers some evidence as to why the filmmakers changed so much. It’s fairly tedious. In fact, it’s a show that was more or less made by its theme song, which promised more tension and excitement than the show itself, constrained by conventions of the time, could offer. The individual plots don’t exploit the Topkapi-style engineer scam as much as you think, the politics of the show is retrograde, even for its time, and one of the episodes even posits the existence of ghosts, which come to the IMF teams aid.

This is a show with an international canvas that looks like it never got out of the Paramount back lot. It’s interior scenes are either badly lit or over lit. Like most shows of the time, the set decoration is atrocious. Orange couches on green rugs with red walls. While throwing up slightly into my mouth, I wondered why the sets were so garish, and then remembered that color TVs at the time weren’t particularly sophisticated (a fact parodied in the otherwise predictable Invincible), and the louder it was the easier it was to “see.”Seasons were longer then, and MI season one has 28 episodes spread across seven discs with no extras, though the episodes are announced as digitally remastered in both sound and picture. To harp on the subject of extras again, there are lots of fans of the show out there who have written books or kept blogs or fan sites in its honor. Presumably they are intelligent enough to add their voices to either commentary tracks or to write text for screen or booklet. Excluding the fans on the discs is to eventually exclude them from buying future sets because their viewing experience won’t be enhanced and there is no compensation for badly shot, acted, and written episodes.

Mission Impossible season one hit the street on December 5th, 2006, retailing for $59.95.

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