Tom Cruise’s Scientologist Soul

Bruce Willis and Nicolas Cage are strangely important to the story of the Mission: Impossible franchise, as I understand that story. The first Mission: Impossible arrived in 1996, amid a long decade of big-budget, big box-office, shamelessly over-the-top action movies starring those two actors, such as the Die Hard movies and Armageddon (Willis), and The Rock and Con Air (Cage). These movies created and refined a certain action-movie style and tone, which emerged more or less organically from the acting methods of those two megastars of that silly decade.