High Flight, Deep Dive

Like the producers of the latest Mission: Impossible movies, I have made the radical decision to break this latest edition into two parts. Part II will arrive sometime tomorrow. Choose to accept it.

Roger Ebert made a lot of great observations about cinema, but this is the line that continues to resonate most strongly with me: “A movie is not what it is about, but how it is about it.”

There are only so many stories in the world, but there are infinite ways to express them, and every choice – in writing, in casting, in framing, in directing the actors and the crew, in editing, in scoring – is in some way a statement. And puzzling out the meaning behind those statements can be exhilarating or infuriating, depending on the movie. Sometimes it’s both.

No fewer than three recent releases ride that line, either consciously or unconsciously: Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Ari Aster’s Eddington and Zach Cregger’s Weapons. Each of them arrived heavy with portent and hidden meanings over the summer, asking us to look closely at their themes and tangled plotting. Why are we seeing what we’re seeing? In one of those movies, that question is essential to the story being told; I’m not so sure about the others.

Let’s start with The Final Reckoning, the eighth and possibly last chapter in Tom Cruise’s decades-spanning M:I franchise. It’s a three-hour adventure in which Tom Cruise saves all life on Earth from being either eradicated or enslaved by an artificial intelligence which is, for all intents and purposes, an alien god.

In 2023’s Dead Reckoning: Part One (just Dead Reckoning now, by the way), the malevolent AI was defined as a sentient algorithm so good at predicting human behavior that the only way to outwit it is to do the one thing no sane person would do – so naturally, Ethan Hunt is the only person on the planet whose moves it can’t predict. Would it be so difficult for a superintelligent program to flip a bit from “nah, he’d never do the craziest thing imaginable” to “hmm, what’s the craziest thing imaginable, he’ll absolutely do that”? Apparently!

Anyway, Dead Reckoning ended with Ethan and his team discovering the literal key to defeating the Entity – which they’d been chasing for the entire movie – was merely the first step in their quest. The key merely unlocks a secure drive that holds the original source code for the Entity, with vulnerabilities upon which our heroes can build a digital countermeasure … and as we saw in the earlier film’s prologue, that drive is a mile or so under the ocean, on a sunken Russian submarine.

So now Ethan and friends have to convince the US government – and everyone along the chain of command – to let the IMF find the sub without leaving a digital footprint that the Entity can find. Oh, and they have three days before the Entity seizes control of the world’s nuclear arsenal, at which point it can choose to go Skynet at any moment. Which means that Ethan Hunt is put in a position, over and over and over again, to stand in front of people and beg them to believe in him, one more time.

Perhaps you’re wondering why this should be so, in a franchise that’s spent nearly thirty years demonstrating that Ethan Hunt is the best, smartest, bravest, most incorruptible person on the planet. In movie after movie, Ethan Hunt has proven that his resourcefulness is unmatched, his instincts infallible. He’s saved America and the world, defeating every backstabber, mole and rogue agent who dared to oppose him. At this point he is the Impossible Mission Force. He never fails; he can only be failed by the cowardice of those who aren’t as brave and daring. And yet, he can’t just show up in a war room and lay out his plan without those stupid generals and admirals insisting they know better.

Maybe it’s a Scientology thing – it’s almost certain a Scientology thing – with Cruise needing to act out whatever super-genius mythology he’s built around himself over the decades. Ethan Hunt sees the world as it really is, surrounded by threats only he can understand. He’s always at the center of the chaos. Even The Final Reckoning’s retconned revelation that Ethan himself is responsible for the existence of the Entity – sort of – is rooted in his past heroics. The people he works with – his disciples – do it because they love him, and the people who oppose him do that because they hate him. It’s always personal, because Ethan Hunt is the most important person in the world.

We see all this over The Final Reckoning’s many, many flashbacks, which pull moments from all the previous Mission movies to support many, many expository briefings and monologues. There is no need for most of this stuff – all you need to know for this movie to work is the thing about the Russian sub – but apparently Cruise and McQuarrie have to justify the decision to split the script into two movies. As a result, they’ve expanded a movie that might have run three hours into a double-feature that runs about five and a half, and there is simply not enough story for that.

If Dead Reckoning left us with the promise of an even bigger adventure to come, The Final Reckoning does not deliver on that promise. All the things we’ve come to expect from a Mission movie are here – risky global travel, international brinksmanship, a dangerous underwater stunt, an aerial chase – along with the unlikely guest stars who turn up to demonstrate this gargantuan franchise can still surprise us. But this is the first time it doesn’t amount to anything. There’s no tension to The Final Reckoning, because Ethan Hunt is literally too big to fail.

Despite all the speeches about how this Mission is the culmination of Ethan Hunt’s entire career, and that his life may well be the price of defeating the Entity, there’s no way that was ever going to happen –Cruise had the chance to do the heroic self-sacrifice thing in Top Gun: Maverick and backed away from the idea like he’d touched a hot stove. As the film presents it, the biggest challenge of The Final Reckoning isn’t the Entity: it’s the authority figures who might say no to Tom Cruise. And structurally, they’re just not going to be allowed to do that.

Tom Cruise has to win. Tom Cruise cannot imagine himself as a character who might misjudge a threat. And so we are stuck watching Ethan Hunt beg people who should know better to let him save the world, starting with the goddamn President of the United States (Angela Bassett), who more than anyone would know how often Ethan Hunt has already done that when no one else could.

In order to move through the various stages of his solo mission to reach that sunken sub, Ethan Hunt must first win the loyalty of some new character like he’s completing the levels of a video game; meanwhile his team has to spend that hour chasing down a lead in the Arctic that just so happens to tie into Ethan Hunt’s very first impossible mission, because it all comes back to Ethan Hunt.

I should also point out that all this happens in the first two hours of the movie, because there’s another exhausting set piece left to come – one that’s remarkably similar to the climax of Fallout seven years ago, because Cruise and McQuarrie are running on fumes at this point. It’s one thing to bring back bit players from the first film and have them thank Ethan Hunt at length for ruining their careers because it set them on a new course to fulfillment; it’s quite another to have Ethan Hunt himself re-enact his previous triumphs in slightly different situations because there are only so many ways Tom Cruise can try to get himself killed.

The recycling is even more obvious when one realizes that Cruise and McQuarrie decided to name Ethan’s nebulous adversary “the Entity” a year after Top Gun: Maverick resurrected “The Enemy” as its all-purpose villain. And The Final Reckoning just rolls on and on, ending with a truly weird valedictory speech from an O.G. Hunt disciple thanking him for merely existing. Ethan Hunt can never die, he’s kept alive by the faith of his followers. He just defeated a lying God and gave the world back the truth. Hallelujah.

It’s very, very strange to watch Cruise and McQuarrie jettison all the ambiguity and metaphor of the previous seven features to go full OT VIII with this one … and now we get to wonder whether they stretched the franchise out to eight movies as an inside joke. Jeez.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning arrives on disc following the same special-edition structure as its predecessor, with the feature – presented in the split-format version screened in IMAX theaters – isolated on its own 4K and Blu-ray platters for maximum bitrate, while the bulk of the special features are moved onto their own BD.

That disc is a mirror image of the Dead Reckoning extras, which again is no surprise; we get five brief featurettes – some of which are very brief, less than 20 minutes total – on the stunts, the locations and the score, a collection of “editorial content” that offers another 20 minutes of deleted scenes and unused footage from the climax (with optional commentary from McQuarrie), four promotional spots and some still galleries.

As in the previous set, The Final Reckoning can be viewed with an audio commentary in which writer-director McQuarrie discusses the enormity of the project with editor Eddie Hamilton (and this time, they’re joined by first assistant director Mary Boulding) and an isolated score track; The Final Reckoning also offers a track in which McQuarrie and Cruise talk about the movie, the franchise and their own creative partnership, among other things. Scientology does not come up.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is available in 4K/BD combo and BD-only editions from Paramount Home Distribution. There is also a steelbook release.

Up next: Part II of this newsletter, with my reviews of Eddington and Weapons! See you tomorrow!