A big movie needs a big score, and there’s no bigger movie than “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” the eighth entry in the action franchise Tom Cruise and Brian De Palma inaugurated almost 30 years ago. The series has become known for its spectacular stunt sequences, and “The Final Reckoning” features two of the best “Mission: Impossible” set pieces ever: a deep dive Cruise’s Ethan Hunt takes through a sunken Russian submarine and a harrowing mid-air pursuit that sees Hunt climbing all over every inch of a speeding biplane as he attempts to stop bad guy Gabriel (Esai Morales).
These sequences have been justly celebrated for their stunts, editing, and camerawork, but their secret weapon — and one of the keys to the film‘s overall impact — is the music by composers Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey. Throughout the film, their score helps acclimate the audience emotionally and geographically, and provides an underlying structure for the set pieces that keeps them from becoming monotonous. Each of the action sequences plays like its own self-contained short film with escalating tension and multiple tonal shifts, all of which the score makes cohesive and more emotionally affecting.
The composers credit their early involvement with allowing them to create a fully integrated score, as they came on board during shooting while the screenplay was still in flux. For six months, the composers communicated back and forth with writer-director Christopher McQuarrie as the story evolved and fed their musical ideas — and vice versa. “They wanted us to be part of the storytelling process,” Godfrey told IndieWire. “They would chopper in from set and join us for meetings, and the editor, Eddie Hamilton, was right next door to us. It was a very close, intimate working environment.”
Because Hamilton and McQuarrie waited until late in the process to worry about winnowing the film’s running time down, Aruj and Godfrey had a massive amount of footage to score throughout those six months. “We were following the wide emotional arcs of the characters,” Godfrey said, adding that the well-resourced nature of the production meant he and Aruj had the time and space they needed to experiment. “We had to create so much material and keep throwing paint at the canvas.”
One of the things that’s impressive about the score for “Final Reckoning” is its variety, as Aruj and Godfrey move between various styles and incorporate a wide array of instruments to create their sonic landscape. Although it’s a sequel, the composers didn’t feel constrained by what came before, though they did have one key component of early “Mission: Impossible” movies that they wanted to incorporate. “Our North Star was Lalo Schifrin’s timeless theme,” Aruj told IndieWire, noting that as long as he and Godfrey weaved that original theme into the score, they had complete freedom to follow this specific story wherever it led them.
“[McQuarrie] was not interested in following any kind of rule book,” Aruj said. “We were not supposed to pay attention to what was done on other scores. We just needed to write music that worked with the tone of the story, the characters, and the dialogue.” Aruj and Godfrey had both worked on earlier “Mission” scores under their mentor Lorne Balfe, so, to a certain degree, they had developed an intuition for what made sense in the franchise and what didn’t. “We have an idea of how to work in this world without taking any weird departures.”
One thing that was specific to “The Final Reckoning” was the global threat at the heart of the story. “It’s the end of the world,” Godfrey said. “It’s not just the end of whatever country the characters happen to be in.” To that end, Aruj and Godfrey incorporated a wide array of international influences into their score, ranging from Burundian drumming and Russian string instruments to Inuit throat singing at the lowest octave performable by the human voice. The broad influences give an even greater sense of scale to what’s already the biggest and most ambitious “Mission: Impossible” movie to date.
For that submarine sequence, Aruj and Godfrey also used a custom instrument called a Space Bass, which uses stainless steel rods and sheets to produce deep, powerful sounds. “It’s part metal, part bowed,” Aruj said. “It looks a bit like a marimba, and it vibrates in a way that one could imagine a submarine would vibrate if it were banging against the rocks as it is in the movie. We used it to create an otherworldly sound because the sequence when Ethan is underwater is quite long. So we needed something that made you feel like you were somewhere different.”
The composers also relied on French percussionist and string player Louis Perez to bring textures to the submarine sequence. “ He was able to bow different metals, scrape bass drums in such a way that he created these tones that mimic the space a little bit,” Aruj said. “But they also mimic the groaning metallic beast-like quality that the sub has.”
Godfrey added that finding the right number of layers for the set piece required painstaking trial and error, as the composers and sound team worked to create a sense of tension that would excite the audience without suffocating them.
“McQuarrie and Tom Cruise are very wary of making the sound too punishing,” Godfrey said. “Our brief was to create stress and tension, but it’s not punishing you, it’s entertaining.”
Aruj said that striking that balance in the biplane sequence was especially arduous. “ To structure that and split it into different acts and find music that worked on even the most basic level was so difficult. It took us months and months to get the first piece approved.”
Even once pieces were approved, Aruj and Godfrey had to be nimble in moving pieces of score around and cutting them down as the edit evolved. “ You would spend an incredible amount of time writing for scenes that were going to be shortened, and you didn’t know how, and you didn’t know when, and you didn’t know why,” Godfrey said. “You would have to spend the time writing a long piece of music, but then also know when it was time to let go of that piece of music and have to do something new because the scene was in a different structural place in the film, and it has to do something different.”
Ultimately, the composers agreed that the epic nature of both the movie and the scoring process provided an experience that will not be easily replicated anytime soon. “ This was the most well-resourced score I’ve ever worked on or probably will ever work on,” Godfrey said. “We recorded in three different countries with over a hundred musicians, choir, brass strings, everything. And that was so exciting and fun to be around. It was just like Christmas.”
