Trailer
Plot summary
Jim Phelps leads his Impossible Missions Force team to Prague to stop a rogue agent, Alexander Golitsyn, from taking the CIA's NOC list, a file that names undercover agents across Europe. The list is stolen and the team is killed one by one, leaving Ethan Hunt, Phelps's pointman, the only survivor. At a debriefing with IMF director Eugene Kittridge, Ethan is treated as the prime suspect, and he escapes using a plastic explosive disguised as chewing gum.
Cast
- Valentina Yakuninaas Drunken Female IMF Agent
- Nathan Osgoodas Kittridge Technician
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Mission: Impossible (1996)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For the vault-heist scene in which Ethan Hunt is suspended by a cable, Tom Cruise put British pound coins in his shoes as counterweights to keep himself level.
SPOILER
Peter Graves, who played Jim Phelps in the original Mission: Impossible series and its late-1980s revival, was offered the chance to return but turned it down when he learned his character would be exposed as a traitor and killed off at the end.- French rail authorities refused to let the production film on the TGV, so Brian De Palma scouted railroads on two continents; Tom Cruise dined with the TGV's owners and the crew were granted permission the next day.
- The glass-walled restaurant scene, with a giant lobster tank and three overhead fish tanks holding 16 tons of water, was Tom Cruise's idea; Brian De Palma tried it with a stuntman first, then asked Cruise to do it despite the chance the actor could drown.
- Alan Silvestri was hired to score the film but his music was rejected and replaced with Danny Elfman's; Silvestri had recorded around 20 minutes, and the decision to drop him was reportedly made by producer Tom Cruise in post-production.
- Promotion of the film in Germany was complicated by Bavarian Minister-President Edmund Stoiber's ban on Scientologists joining the state civil service, and the ruling CDU/CSU's youth wing, the Junge Union, boycotted it over Tom Cruise's Scientology affiliation.
- David Koepp was fired when the film was green-lit, with Robert Towne made lead writer, and was brought back later; he was reportedly paid $1 million to rewrite an original script by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz.
- An early opening sequence introducing a love triangle between Jim Phelps, his wife Claire and Ethan Hunt was cut after George Lucas advised that it took test audiences out of the genre, according to Brian De Palma.
