Mission: Impossible – Fallout

I remember when I was a boy, occasionally my parents would get themselves an Indian takeaway. I was always offered some and always declined. While I found the smell enticing, I found the prospect of spicy food to be a scary one indeed. I just knew how much I would hate it. One time I relented under much pressure and tried a bit and confirmed that I hated it, but of course I already knew that I would. Fast forward a decade and a half to when I was living in my own house, and my friends wanted to go out for a curry. I didn’t want to have a curry, but I did want to go out with my friends, so off I went. This time, with a mindset that I wanted to have a good time, I found that not only did I not hate the curry, I actually really liked it. Fast forward another twenty years and Indian food is my favourite cuisine.

In case you hadn’t got the point of this very heavy-handed analogy – sometimes we change our minds. Opinions aren’t facts – they’re shaped by a number of factors, how we’re feeling at the time, how things are going at work, whether it’s rainy or sunny, whether it’s Monday morning or Friday night. And sometimes we allow our biases – both the conscious ones and the unconscious ones – to have an undue influence on how we respond to something.

I don’t know how many film scores I’ve written about over the years – hundreds, maybe thousands. Every now and again I find myself looking at something I wrote at some earlier point for one reason or another, and often I find myself wondering what I was smoking at the time to have written what I did. But while it’s common that I find myself enjoying something to a much greater or lesser degree than I did at the time I wrote about it, I can’t often say I was “wrong” about something because whatever I wrote reflected how I felt at the time. Opinions can’t be wrong. But they can be ill-informed. When I wrote about Mission: Impossible – Fallout on July 17 2018, I got it wrong. Maybe something crap had happened that week, maybe I was in another “not another Remote Control composer!” mood – maybe I was allowing preconceptions to improperly cloud my judgement. Anyway, it was wrong and I was horrible about the music and insulting to Lorne Balfe and that makes me feel bad. In order to preserve my stupidity for all to see, I’ve pasted the original review into a comment at the end of this new one.

It’s a very different beast to the earlier Mission: Impossible scores – but they’re nearly all different beasts to each other, too, since they were almost all written by different composers. What Balfe did with his score was essentially take the Inception sound that was dominant at the time and shove it through a Mission: Impossible filter to create a very modern action/thriller score with very clear and obvious tips of the hat to Lalo Schifrin. Indeed, we hear the first in the opening bars of the opening piece of music, “A Storm is Coming”, with the bongos – and bongos go on to feature heavily.

Also featuring heavily are Lalo Schifrin’s two themes – both his absolute genius-level main theme (perhaps the best tv theme ever?) and “The Plot”, which has been used by all the movie series’ composers. I think both of them are featured more heavily in this score than any of the others – the main theme is absolutely everywhere, sometimes overtly but often somewhat hidden, perhaps just the rhythm or a subtle hint of its opening bars on the timpani. It’s actually quite fun hearing it with that distinctive Balfe horn sound when it bursts out in “Fallout”.

There’s an absolute load of action music here. The best track is “Stairs and Rooftops” with the 70s thriller-style piano rumbling, a complex mass of percussion, darting string runs and tension-relieving bursts of brass. It continues into “No Hard Feelings” – those little low-end piano figures are terrific – and then the marvellous “Free Fall”, with its choppy strings building tension which gets ratcheted up further with some echoing horns, finally resolving in a brilliant climax. Later, “Escape Through Paris” is another barnstorming highlight with some dynamic variants on both Schifrin themes scattered through some breathless action material. And really, you could pick almost any track and you’d find a very decent piece of action music, with only occasional pauses for breath.

There is one of my original complaints that I feel I should somewhat sheepishly retain, and that’s that the album is 96 minutes long. Now I know that lots of people like their soundtrack albums to be very long like that, and that’s a perfectly valid opinion, but I think to sustain such a massive length you really need the music to have its own dramatic architecture that takes you on some sort of emotional journey – this music undoubtedly supports its film absolutely fine but what it doesn’t really do when pulled apart from its intended purpose is have those dramatic and emotional highs and lows – there’s not a different feeling about the early action cues compared with the later ones, so there is a very samey feeling running through it all. A tight, 1990s-style soundtrack album presenting the highlights would have made that a non-issue.

I’ve been pummelled into submission on that album length point over the years – it is what it is and I realise I have no choice but to live with it if I want to keep listening to film music. So instead I must focus on the positives – and this score has lots of them. It’s genuinely exciting, has a vibrant energy running through it, makes a good film even better and can very firmly stand alongside the very fine music written for the earlier films in the series (I still think Danny Elfman’s score for the first one stands above the rest, but all of the rest have their own qualities). Apologies to all concerned for getting it so wrong the first time.