I have seen Mission: Impossible a bunch of times, and I like it, but I’ve always felt like I couldn’t really decode it. When I watched it a couple of days ago I sat down with a notepad and tried to chart out everything that is going on. It’s difficult. For an action blockbuster, this is a complex movie.

The beginning is especially confusing. We see an agent watching an interrogation on a monitor. It starts at the end of a story unrelated to the rest of the movie – we don’t know who is being interrogated or why, or which side we’re supposed to be “rooting for.” The set feels stark and plastic. I’m reminded that Mission: Impossible was a TV show in the 1960s and 70s.

Cut to Jon Voight. An old-school action star. He smokes. He’s suave. He has an uncharacteristically young and beautiful wife. It’s almost a noir when we see Cruise and Voight skulking around in the dark and mist near the beginning of the film. Voight is a symbol of this older world where decisions are made by men in suits and with gray hair smoking on airplanes. The IMF leadership are all older, white men.

Cruise is a symbol of modernity. His hair is unkempt. He runs everywhere. He frequently masks himself as powerful members of the hegemony but his character is creative, maverick and focused. He cracks jokes. He does magic tricks.

The characters who are successful in Mission: Impossible are those who buck traditional trends and represent a society that appreciates diverse worldviews. The motherly, middle-aged female arms dealer. The luxurious, giddy braggadocio black hacker. And a young, infatigable secret agent who refuses to believe the rules apply to him.

This movie is about change. Cruise sprints away from a restaurant that is literally flooded with the trappings of spy movies and cracks the case because he embraces new technology (i.e. the internet). But the old world isn’t dead. Jon Voight reappears and his existence puts everyone in danger.

For an action movie, it is bizarrely serene. Save for the action scene on the train at the end there is very little action. Most of the violence occurs off-screen. The heist scene is silent, still and slow-moving, purely intense. The score is slow and dissonant. It is designed by Brian DePalma to make you feel like something is amiss. Because like a secret agent wearing a mask, something is, even if you don’t notice it.

DePalma loves the grotesque baroqueness of those masks. Whenever Cruise rips one off the camera lingers on the rubber and sinew shredding like a reptilian skin and revealing a fresh new face underneath. Modernity. Change. Rebirth.

It’s crazy how different this movie is tonally from the recent entries into the M:I franchise. But we’ll get to that.

The only thing this movie gets wrong is the internet. Somehow Ethan Hunt successfully contacts a mysterious arms dealer by inventing an email address with no domain based on a usenet discussion group he found. Screenwriters could get away with that in 1996, but it feels false and off-putting to watch today.

This comes 10 years after Cruise’s other career-defining role in Top Gun. While Top Gun is remembered fondly mostly for nostalgic reasons, this one is a clear illustration of why Tom became the biggest movie star on the planet.

Not a lot of popcorn movies go this deep. You’ve probably seen it multiple times like I have. Watch it again.

Next: Jerry Maguire