Poster Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
Paramount

The music of 'Mission: Impossible'

With the fifth film in the Mission: Impossible film franchise out today, how do we talk about the music that has brought each of these to life? It all gets back to Lalo Schifrin. His theme has defined this narrative from the beginning.

Written for the original 1960s television series, the theme has become iconic. As NPR points out, "one of the most appealing things about it...is that it's in 5/4 time." This means that "the piece contains five beats to the measure, instead of the more typical three or four." This may seem to be a simple variation, but we are so accustomed to music having three and four beats per measure that when someone changes it up, our ears take notice.

Over the history of the film franchise, we have heard the theme rendered in a variety of ways. Joe Kraemer, who scored the most recent version, told me his goal was "to create a score that honored the work done by Lalo Schifrin in the 1960s when he created the iconic theme for the TV series, while at the same time, not doing a pastiche that sounded cliche or dated, or came off like a spoof."

Here's a complete timeline of the Mission: Impossible movies—and the composers of the movies' scores.

Mission: Impossible (1996): Danny Elfman

The great Danny Elfman had the first chance to write Mission: Impossible movie music. Directed by Brian De Palma, the first film in the series owes a great debt to Schifrin's original ideas and keeps the sense of thrilling espionage front and center. We don't often hear this kind of respect to musical atmosphere, as summer blockbusters have become built around thrill-ride dynamics.

Highly reverential to Schifrin, Elfman does not go too far afield and merely brings in a huge base of percussion and brass to shove the theme into a new decade. He also ends the theme with a solid bass line that serves to distinguish his variation. Elfman's brand of composing was a perfect starting point for the franchise reboot, his ability to manipulate percussion with winds and brass created a sturdy support beam.

Mission: Impossible II (2000): Hans Zimmer and other artists

While Hans Zimmer was brought in to score the second film in the franchise, responsibilities for the main theme were actually handled by the rap-rock band Limp Bizkit. That was a misstep among many in this film, often regarded as the worst in the franchise; every choice seemed driven by an attempt to align the series with the fads of the moment.

John Woo, who directed the film, was hot off his first couple of jumps into American action cinema, and swung this narrative into one action set piece after another without much connection to the roots of the series. The soundtrack of music "from and inspired by" fits the pop charts of the late 90s early 2000s with Metallica, Rob Zombie, and Chris Cornell from Soundgarden rounding out a record that overshadowed Zimmer's work. It's the outlier of the series that has been mostly forgotten.

Mission: Impossible III (2006) and Mission: Impossible IV - Ghost Protocol (2011): Michael Giacchino

A longtime collaborator of J.J. Abrams, who directed the third Mission: Impossible film and is largely responsible for bringing the series back to legitimacy, Michael Giacchino scored the third and fourth films in the franchise, with the fourth film's directing responsibilities taken on by another long-time collaborator, Brad Bird.

With the third film being something of a redefinition and rebirth, Giacchino takes a step back to the mindset presented in Elfman's interpretation and reverence for Lalo Schifrin. There is a lot more big brass, and Giacchino writes in a few subtle changes that distinguish the piece, but his reverence for a classical orchestra really serve to bring legitimacy back to the music of the series.

As with his take on the fourth installment, the push in both these films is much more action-oriented rather than lower key espionage. These are blockbuster films as we know them today, and while they recaptured some of the original series's (relatively) subtle focus on espionage, there's also plenty of widescreen action—so it's appropriate that the music is very forward-pushing and big.

For the fourth film, Schifrin's theme is also dramatically reworked. Many saw Ghost Protocol as a new beginning, with the third film somewhat cleaning the audience's palate after the distasteful second film. This takes the original theme into some new territory; while the new orchestrations do work really well in their own right, Giacchino also seems to forget what this franchise is really all about: the weighty simplicity of Schifrin's original work. Giacchino does bring more strings into the fourth film's arrangements, speaking to the Russian "bad guy" aesthetic of the film versus the third film's American "bad guy," who was evoked by brass.

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015): Joe Kraemer

Joe Kraemer is one of the most interesting composers working today. His score for Christopher McQuarrie's first film as director, The Way of the Gun, is still a standout of composition that has, sadly, been forgotten by most. When McQuarrie was brought on to direct the fifth film in the series, it was sort of a foregone conclusion that Kraemer would also be brought on due to their long-standing collaboration, and once onboard Kraemer really wanted to honor the original ideas presented by Lalo Schifrin. He made the choice to use only instruments that he Schifrin could have used in the '60s (so no synthesizers, and no Bizkits), and developed new ideas inspired by smaller pieces composed for the original series as well as some of the classical canon.

"I decided to embrace Lalo's original theme, as it is one of my favorite compositions," Kraemer told me. "But I took it apart and broke it down in to three main elements, which I then used in different permutations and combinations to construct new cues for this film.

"In addition, I had to write new themes for Solomon Lane, the film's villain, as well as the Syndicate, his evil organization. Pretty much every character has at least one music motif associated with them. Ilsa Faust's theme is based on the aria Nessun Dorma from Pucinni's opera Turandot, as that music becomes associated with her during an early sequence in the film. Benji's theme comes from a piece Lalo wrote for the TV show called 'The Plot,' as I liked to imagine that Benji had a fantasy that he was starring in a TV show all through the movie!

"Finally, I created a musical texture derived from elements of minimalist composition to help score high-tech scenes that in another film might have used a synthesizer."

Kraemer's thoughtful considerations highlights a direction for this fifth film not unlike that of the most recent James Bond installments: a looking back to look forward that really tries to keep the material relevant, but not in a way that disregards tradition. The music of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation has the most connections to the original TV concept since Danny Elfman's take, and while Kraemer too did some reworking of the original theme, it was only to embolden the ideas rather than delegate them to the dustbin of history.

Garrett Tiedemann is a writer, filmmaker and composer who owns the multimedia lab CyNar Pictures and its record label American Residue Records.

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