Cruise's last decent movie?
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shareMission: Impossible - Fallout, Mission: Impossible 5 - Rogue Nation, Edge of Tomorrow, Rock of Ages, Mission: Impossible 4 - Ghost Protocol, Knight and Day and Tropic Thunder were all good.
shareyou proved the OP's point
shareAnd yet people still forget Mission Impossible 3. The last M:I film where he actually acted dramatically. He is an amazing stuntman yet that is what the other sequels are about. I miss the dramatic suspenseful thriller plot we got in the first film too.
shareI've only seen up until M:I3, but the first film's spy-thriller story and atmosphere seems to have been replaced with pure action movie (even by M:I2). M:I the first was awesome.
shareBy the way you heard the rejected score by Alan Silvestri (Back To The Future, Predator)? He originally was the composer for M:I yet for some reason producers didn't agree on his music. Most likely because he didn't use the main TV theme during the action scenes. To me it was heavily underrated.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uL02MuItMXI
I'll give it a listen; I've never heard it. Yeah, they probably wanted the iconic music used more often if he wasn't doing that.
shareI just listened to it back-to-back with the clip from the original film (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AysV4mGh4fc). Obviously the original has the benefit of being fully mixed by the studio, whereas the rejected score is just a main theme slapped over the scene. Still, whoever put the video together did a good job of mixing in some of the sound from the film (or close) so it still feels pretty good.
I like the Silvestri score, although it's hard to tell if I'd like it more than the one they used. Again, I'm listening to a piece tailored specifically for that part of the film vs. a score that wasn't ever fully integrated. I really like the ticking-bomb stuff (around 2:17 in the clip you sent me) and the immediately-following horn stuff. The very, very '80s electric guitar riffs... I'm not so wild about those, but maybe if I were hearing the Silvestri score in the '80s I'd feel differently. It is a very good score, though, and I think they could have used it to great effect.
Two final notes:
I've seen M:I a bunch of times, so something automatically feels "right" about the original score. That's just because of my experiences, not necessarily the quality, but the used score works so well with the film. Maybe that's why they rejected Silvestri's: they were looking for "perfect". Or, maybe I'd feel the same way if I'd heard Silvestri's score properly mixed, edited, and integrated with the film in a completed version.
Lastly, I don't think it was a mistake to mix in the M:I theme. In the original film (not in the clip I shared) when Ethan leaps from train to helicopter, there is a triumphant music sting and the M:I theme kicks in and it pumps me up just thinking about it. It's a great moment, an iconic theme, and I get where if you're doing M:I, you want that music in the best parts, the most dramatic parts, and the most triumphant parts; so I get that.
PS (edit)
I thought of this after pushing, "POST": M:I also uses silence really well. In the clip I shared, it's ambient noise long before the music kicks in. We get a sense of the velocity, wind, and power of the train - the danger and reality of the scene - long before any thrilling music starts. And, of course, the most well-known sequence in the film - the Langley Drop - has no music and is almost entirely silent (if I remember correctly) which holds tension far more than any score could have done. Hats off to De Palma for his excellent work on that film!
I didn't really think of it that way yet now that you mention it Silvestri's score sure does have more of an 80s action style to it. Also irony how the next film Silvestro scored was 'Eraser' the following year with Arnold Schwarzenegger (if you listen to that sounds like he was very inspired from his rejected M:I score when he made that).
Also another thing to add, Silvestri used additional music written for the TV show in his score which was then used in the M:I N64 & PS1 game. It wasn't used in any of the Cruise films until 4th I believe.
I never watched the show so assumed this music during the beginning mission briefing scene was only made for the game. Interesting that Danny Elfman didn't use it in any scenes from what I remember:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kS-RU_xNqIw
The weirdest association I had listening to the Silvestri score guitar riff was that it reminded me of the guitar riffs in the title number of The Phantom of the Opera (also very '80s sound). Not that an '80s sound is a bad thing necessarily...
Interesting about the TV show music. I've only seen a couple episodes of the show, and I don't remember them at all really. I wonder if Elfman even watched it. He was getting called in late to the party - I assume, since he was replacing Silvestri - and knew that Silvestri's score didn't have enough M:I main theme in it, so he might have just written music to suit the rough edit and threw in the M:I theme a few times, using its key, chords, and melody as a starting point for his own work.
I've long admired Elfman's ability to sound like other composers and to use different ideas in his music. He did Hellboy II and deliberately tried to follow what Hellboy I's composer had done to honour that work, and I respect and admire that. He's got his own "sound" but he can lance out if-needed, like if he needs to do a late Cold War spy-thriller, for example... John Williams is one of the best - if not the best - but he almost always has the same vibe. Jaws is the only score I can think of that has a different flavour to it.