ACHIEVING THE IMPOSSIBLE

An elite team, comprising people with their own unique set of skills, guided by a charismatic leader on a quest of seemingly insurmountable odds... Sound familiar? Total Film meets the key creative powerhouses crafting Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One into a tour de force of tension and suspense.

- MATT MAYTUM

There’s one achievement that’s perhaps more jaw-dropping than any of the extreme stunts that star/producer Tom Cruise has completed. And it’s that - in a world of IP fatigue and diminishing returns - Mission: Impossible is a rare (unique?) franchise that’s managed to keep getting better. The biggest challenge that two-part epic Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning faces is living up to its predecessor, 2018’s Fallout - the hands-down best film in the series, and the highest-grosser, too.

Dead Reckoning Part One opens this summer, and finds Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his IMF team on a mission to stop a potentially catastrophic weapon falling into the wrong hands. As well as the likes of Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) returning, a figure from Hunt’s past is back in the form of Henry Czerny’s Eugene Kittridge (last seen in the first Mission: Impossible movie, back in 1996), and new threats are played by Esai Morales and Pom Klementieff.

Writer/director and long-time Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie returns for the third (and fourth) time here, and once again he’ll be balancing globe-hopping scale and increasingly breathtaking stunts (car chases! Locomotive smackdowns! Motorcycle cliff leaps!), but, as he tells Total Film, he’s increasingly fixated on Ethan’s inner emotional journey. TF meets McQuarrie and key filmmaking allies - editor Eddie Hamilton, composer Lorne Balfe and music supervisor Cecile Tournesac - for a masterclass on crafting a crowd-pleasing spectacle under intense pressure, and to find out how their biggest competition is themselves.