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****/**** starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Angela Bassett written by Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen directed by Christopher McQuarrie
by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There is a brief period in most of our lives where we feel as though we are part of a large, maybe operatic melodrama that is barely comprehensible to us, but of which we are a vital component. If the world is lucky, we grow out of it. As part of the brain’s formation, it seems, as part of Freud’s or Lacan’s self-recognition, there is this wet gulf during which we believe that everything matters. It has to be an evolutionary response–the last gasp of profound weltschmerz on the way to nihilistic self-interest. On the one side is the self-righteousness of adolescence; on the other, a dangerous megalomania. And then there’s Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible film franchise, which is fundamentally a clinical dissection of the martyr complex that drives the myth of American exceptionalism. At the core of it all is a serious unpacking of movie stardom–of movies themselves as an essential conduit to the primal core of our monkey makeup. They tickle every pleasure centre. When Mission: Impossible movies are exciting, few movies were ever as exciting. When they’re sexy–the yellow dress, my god–they are as sharpened and drowsy as an autumn pheromone. They’re funny, they’re puzzles, and they’re an approach to understanding George Eliot’s quote about how the good of the world depends on the valour of hidden lives lived with virtue and courage. You don’t have to be Ethan Hunt (Cruise) to fix the world, you see. You don’t need to be a superhero, but you do need to be a good person when it’s easier not to be.
Look at these films as a 20-hour celluloid monument to a lifetime’s imprisonment in a nightmare dreamscape where every action has global, spiritual, and existential consequences for an embattled hero who suffers a monstrous payload of slings and arrows–and don’t we all? It would be easier to let the world burn. Ethan Hunt represents the last part of us that doesn’t want it to. The lie of the Trolley Problem is its premise, since it matters not at all to the trolley if one or a hundred million and one people are ground beneath its gears. All along, you thought the story was about you. Enough yous, however, and eventually the trolley will get stuck, and then all is well for, as Ethan states repeatedly in the eighth and final Mission: Impossible, The Final Reckoning, “those we never meet.” The moral of these stories is that you do things that are right for neither praise nor glory, but rather so the human experiment might continue, letting others have the choice to do good or bad things. The Mission: Impossibles see themselves as a potential solution to our current state. All the great films of German Expressionism, of the New American Cinema, of any time during which we saw the Apocalypse at the gates, viewed themselves as a cry for help sealed in a bottle and set to drift along cultural tides. Wake up. Listen. Hurry. Who’s to say they didn’t work? Tech specialist Luther (Ving Rhames) says on his deathbed in The Final Reckoning that we’re defined not by individual actions but by the sum of our choices. We are defined by the product of our hands, and here it is.
The Final Reckoning is about the defeat of “truth” in these first, violent contractions of the Internet age: the balkanization of information, the elevation of vile ideologues, and the emerging trend of cyber-evangelists who see God in generative artificial intelligence. It is predicting the shape the new death cult will take by showing us the shape our current death cult has assumed. The Final Reckoning is careful to feature extended highlight reels from the previous films to tie up its thesis in a powerful, progressive concluding statement of, “I meant to do that.” Intent doesn’t actually matter: If art surfs the tube of the collective unconscious, it will have diagnostic value, regardless of its creator’s intent. But the art does have to be the product of a human hand. The villain of The Final Reckoning is an A.I. that is dangerous mostly because it has created a reality parallel to fact and done so independent of human intervention. The only kind of government that thrives in a zero-knowledge environment is fascism. Fascism is like the strange worms that live next to deep-sea thermal vents, where nothing else can. Fascists are kings of a blasted kingdom, and they feed on the corpses of everything that descends down to them through fathoms of solipsistic obscenity measureless to reasonable men. It’s easy to complain that the Mission: Impossible films are impenetrable slogs of exposition interrupted by some of the best action sequences ever committed to the medium by America’s last movie star–but those are the same reasons I celebrate them. I never know what the fuck is going on, but I know it’s important that this person is on the same side of the gate as me. Yeah, he’s a weirdo and the most visible poster child for a homicidal alien prosperity cult. But have you seen the other guys?
The first hour of The Final Reckoning is a test to see if you’re paying attention. Not to whatever McGuffin it is they’re droning on about, be it keys or Entities or nuclear bombs in the Paris catacombs. No, to see if you’re paying attention to the importance of good people doing good things in the face of bad people doing bad things. Even if they’re impossible. Did you know the last remaining viable franchises for Paramount are the product of one woman who leveraged her power to develop them for TV because she saw their long-term potential when few did? Star Trek and Mission: Impossible are both Lucille Ball’s children. I mention this because it seems important. A woman made the two most intrinsically progressive intellectual properties possible. A woman, Angela Bassett, also plays the President in The Final Reckoning, and another woman, Hannah Waddington, plays the commanding officer of an aircraft carrier. At one point, the President sends the C.O. a calendar date as her only instruction. It’s a date on which they each lost someone they loved to a war in which the presumably male leadership failed to do the right thing before it was too late. This is important. The details aren’t, and so the film doesn’t share them. The first major stunt-laden set-piece begins around the 70-minute mark (but doesn’t really get going for another 20) as Cruise launches himself into frigid waters and dives to the wreck of a Russian submarine. The captain of the nuclear sub that rescues him is a Black man (Tramell Tillman). It takes a village to fix this mess white men have made of the world, and that village includes white men. The difference between our villages and theirs is that we see value in them and would like their help to survive what’s coming next. The other difference is we’re right. Of course the divemaster coaching Ethan is played by the great Katy O’Brian; we will have truly failed as a national social experiment if she’s not a star after this. Note the number of times Cruise–vilified, reviled Cruise–allows his non-male costars to save his life in his signature franchise. Tom is many things, but he’s not stupid. The future is female.
The stunts in The Final Reckoning are phenomenal. The use of visual effects is seamless, Cruise’s insistence on performing his own stunts wherever possible giving tactile weight to his dives, his great falls from vertiginous heights, his pistoning sprints. His swimming through the interior of a scuttled submarine as it shifts and tumbles down an infinite trench ticked several primal terrors off my personal list, and his showstopping acrobatics across two fixed-wing biplanes pay proper tribute to barnstormers and the heroics of silent-film stars to whom Cruise owes an ultimate debt. You could say that two major action scenes in almost three hours of film are not enough, though I think of it more as over twenty signature action sequences across a running time of just under a day. Better, think of it as the physical manifestation–the proof of concept, if you will–of this series’ unifying theory that doing the right thing in the right way is all you can do to effect genuine and positive change in an era dedicated to doing the wrong things in the easiest ways possible. Films have been teaching this since their inception. When I was a child, I learned that the dark side catered to the greedy and the artless, the lazy and the soulless: It’s the path that leads to extravagant wealth and technologies akin to magic, but also to genocide and absolute power at the expense of humanity and civilization. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a monument to skilled people doing things the hard way because there is no value, and no future, in doing it another way. Is it messianic and self-important? It is. It is because it’s right, and there’s no time left to pretend there are two sides to this.
