It also stars Jon Voight, Henry Czerny, Emmanuelle Béart, Jean Reno, Ving Rhames, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Vanessa Redgrave.

In the film, Ethan Hunt (Cruise) seeks to uncover who framed him for the murders of most of his Impossible Missions Force (IMF) team.

Numerous efforts by Paramount Pictures to create a film adaptation of the television series stalled until Cruise founded Cruise/Wagner Productions in 1992 and decided on Mission: Impossible as its inaugural project.

Principal photography began in March 1995 and lasted until that August, with filming locations including London, Pinewood Studios in England, and Prague (a rarity in Hollywood at the time).

Ethan and Claire recruit two disavowed IMF agents, hacker Luther Stickell and helicopter pilot Franz Krieger.

Ethan pretends to believe Jim and arranges to exchange the list with Max aboard the TGV train to Paris, secretly inviting Kittridge to the meeting.

Paramount Pictures owned the rights to the television series and had tried for years to make a film version but had failed to come up with a viable treatment.

[5] The actor chose Mission: Impossible to be the inaugural project of his new production company and convinced Paramount to put up a $70 million budget.

[6] Cruise and his producing partner, Paula Wagner, worked on a story with filmmaker Sydney Pollack for a few months when the actor hired Brian De Palma to direct.

[11] Principal photography took place between March and August 1995 mainly in Prague and England's Pinewood Studios,[12] but some scenes were shot in London, Scotland and the United States.

Cruise had difficulty finding the right machine to create the wind velocity that would look visually accurate before remembering a simulator he used while training as a skydiver.

[5] Initially, there was a sophisticated opening sequence that introduced a love triangle between Jim Phelps, his wife Claire and Ethan Hunt that was removed on the advice of George Lucas because it took the test audience "out of the genre," according to De Palma.

[16] According to some sources, Silvestri had written and recorded some 20 minutes of music, and the decision to replace him was made by producer Tom Cruise during post-production.

[23] The film's promotion in Germany was complicated by Bavarian Minister-President Edmund Stoiber's ban of Scientologists from joining the state civil service.

[24] In response to Tom Cruise's affiliation with Scientology, members of the ruling CDU/CSU spoke out against the film and its youth organization the Junge Union boycotted it.

The Church of Scientology International responded that it had not invested in the film and that it was part of a pattern of religious discrimination by German authorities.

[24][26] The Church later published an open letter to Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the International Herald Tribune written by Bert Fields comparing German boycotts of Scientologist celebrities such as Cruise to Nazi book burnings.

[33] Earning $45.4 million, Mission: Impossible smashed the short-lived record held by Twister for having the biggest May opening weekend.

[34] The next year, The Lost World: Jurassic Park would take the records for having the largest May opening weekend, the biggest number of screenings and the highest Memorial Day gross.

The website's critics' consensus reads: "Full of special effects, Brian De Palma's update of Mission: Impossible has a lot of sweeping spectacle, but the plot is sometimes convoluted.

"[41] In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden addressed the film's convoluted plot: "If that story doesn't make a shred of sense on any number of levels, so what?

"[42] Mike Clark of USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and said that it was "stylish, brisk but lacking in human dimension despite an attractive cast, the glass is either half-empty or half-full here, though the concoction goes down with ease.

"[44] Time magazine's Richard Schickel wrote, "What is not present in Mission: Impossible (which, aside from the title, sound-track quotations from the theme song and self-destructing assignment tapes, has little to do with the old TV show) is a plot that logically links all these events or characters with any discernible motives beyond surviving the crisis of the moment.

"[45] Writing for Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman gave the film a "B" rating and said, "The problem isn't that the plot is too complicated; it's that each detail is given the exact same nagging emphasis.

Intriguing yet mechanistic, jammed with action yet as talky and dense as a physics seminar, the studiously labyrinthine Mission: Impossible grabs your attention without quite tickling your imagination.

"[46] Numerous reviewers have praised the CIA break-in and the last climactic pursuit scene, despite their mixed feelings about the rest of the film.

Graves had been offered the chance to reprise his role from the TV series but turned it down upon learning his character would be revealed as a traitor, and that he would be killed off at the end of the film.

In an MTV interview in October 2009, Landau stated, "When they were working on an early incarnation of the first one—not the script they ultimately did—they wanted the entire team to be destroyed, done away with one at a time, and I was against that.