Mission: Alias

Ethan Hunt is Sydney Bristow and Mission: Impossible III is a two-hour episode of Alias, at least that’s what I got out of it.

The similarities are, um, impossible to miss. The opening scene started in the thick of the action with Hunt (the always toothy Tom Cruise, who was not horrible) in peril. How did he get there? Flash back to the beginning. This is a classic Alias scene and exactly how director J.J. Abrams began the Jennifer Garner series.

Next we see Hunt at his engagement party where nobody is aware that the purported traffic engineer is actually a spy for the super-secret IMF, much as Sydney is thought to work for a bank and not a black ops section of the CIA. The double life is a central theme of Alias and Hunt and his partners spend a considerable part of the film debating the difficulties of living a “normal” life.

Part of Hunt's team is a geeky, fast-talking techno nerd Benji -- on Alias his name is Marshall. There were many more team parallels, including Luther (Ving Rhames) as Dixon, Declan (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) as Sloane and Owen (Philip Seymour Hoffman) as the evil Sark. And of course there was a cameo by Greg Grunberg who plays Weiss on Alias (and has appeared in every Abrams series.)

No that there is anything wrong with that. Alias always felt like Mission: Impossible so I can see why Cruise brought him on to direct. Of course now he may not have anything left for the Alias movie.