Spies Like Us

Spies Like Us was released in 1985 and directed by John Landis. Rather than simply retelling the plot, the film is worth revisiting for the characters, conflicts and ideas that give its story its identity.

Fear and Freedom emerge through what the characters face and the choices they make, giving the story more to explore beyond its immediate plot.

Emmett Fitz-Hume, Austin Millbarge and Karen Boyer do not begin the film seeing one another clearly, and watching those first impressions break down is a big part of why Spies Like Us still works.

That part of the story matters here for a different reason than it does elsewhere in the article.

Millbarge and Fitz-Hume meet during the test, on which Fitz-Hume openly cheats after his attempts to bribe his supervisor Alice and the test monitor in exchange for the answers both fail. From there, the film can concentrate less on explaining the setup and more on what happens between the people inside it.

Chevy Chase plays Emmett Fitz-Hume. Emmett Fitz-Hume, a wisecracking, pencil-pushing son of an envoy, takes the foreign service exam under peer pressure.

Elsewhere, needing two expendable covert agents to act as decoys to draw attention away from a more capable team, Ruby and Keyes of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) decide to enlist Fitz-Hume and Millbarge, promote them to GLG-20 Foreign Service Operatives, rush them through minimal military survival training and send them on an undefined mission inside Pakistan and Soviet Central Asia. That tension is central to how Emmett Fitz-Hume works within the film.

Dan Aykroyd plays Austin Millbarge. Austin Millbarge is a code breaker dwelling in the dark basement at the Pentagon who aspires to escape his under-respected job to become a secret agent.

Millbarge was not prepared to take the test, having had only one night to study after his supervisor deliberately withheld a two-weeks notice for the exam, leaving him vulnerable to fail and being forced to remain in the depths of the Pentagon.

Jerry Hadley, a member of the main team is killed, while Millbarge and Fitz-Hume manage to escape multiple enemy attacks and eventually encounter Karen Boyer, the surviving operative from the main team.

Spies Like Us has more on its mind than the basic setup suggests. fear sits close to the centre of the film, but it is explored through the characters rather than treated like a lesson.

freedom matters just as much. The film keeps challenging the assumptions its characters make about one another, which is where much of its emotional weight comes from.

Spies Like Us could hardly be separated from the decade that produced it. Released in 1985, it carries the attitudes, style and filmmaking rhythms of the 1980s without needing to announce them.

It also sits comfortably within the era's comedy, spy and buddy filmmaking, even if the movie itself is more interesting than any single genre label suggests.

That is part of why it still appears in conversations about 1980s movies and 1980s comedy movies. The film has become tied not only to its own story but to the wider memory of what 1980s movies felt like.

Watching Spies Like Us now means seeing both what has lasted and what unmistakably belongs to 1985.

That kind of character-driven idea tends to survive changes in fashion far better than surface-level nostalgia.

Some moments inevitably land differently for a modern audience. Revisiting an older film properly means enjoying what still works without pretending every choice has aged equally well.

A large part of that staying power comes from the characters. Emmett Fitz-Hume, Austin Millbarge and Karen Boyer are still useful shorthand for the personalities and pressures the film explores.

Spies Like Us has lasted because people continue to recognise something in it. Nostalgia helps, but nostalgia alone does not keep a movie in the conversation for decades.