Mission: Impossible’s Iconic CIA Vault Break-In Almost Didn’t Make It Into The Movie
There’s no more indelible image from the first “Mission: Impossible” movie than that of Tom Cruise suspended from a cable just inches above an all-white floor. Yet that image almost didn’t make it into the 1996 film as is.
The image comes from the scene where Cruise’s protagonist, Ethan Hunt, breaks into the mainframe of the IMF (Impossible Missions Force) in CIA headquarters. Disavowed IMF agent Franz Krieger (Jean Reno) lowers Hunt head-first into the vault to pull off “the Mount Everest of hacks” at a standalone terminal that is not connected to any other computers. All is going well until a rat in the air duct causes Krieger to lose his grip on the cable and almost drop Hunt onto the floor.
As Hunt explains beforehand in the obligatory heist scene setup, the vault is sound-sensitive, its floor is pressure-sensitive, and it “detects any increase in temperature,” even body heat, which means that a single drop of sweat could set off its intrusion countermeasures. You can see the veins bulging on Cruise’s arms as he struggles to keep his limbs suspended above the floor, and as the actor explained in a 25th-anniversary video (via Paramount Movies) in 2021, he really was physically straining during that moment:
Mission: Impossible’s Iconic CIA Vault Break-In Almost Didn’t Make It Into The Movie
- Advertisment - 