170 minutes to save the world
the endless "best of" clip compilations in mission: impossible - the final reckoning, explained
My goal with this newsletter is to write about new films as they reach general release, along with some seasonally appropriate commentary on other cinematic events and interests. This week we’ve got a review of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. I’ve had a screen headache all week and I’ve been busy with my real job, so I did almost no background research and haven’t seen M:I films 2-7. Also there are LOTS OF SPOILERS, though if you don’t know how this movie about Tom Cruise racing to save the world ends, I really admire your wonder-filled attitude toward cinema. This newsletter comes out every Wednesday, which this week means Saturday, which is way too late and I apologize.
In 1996, Brian De Palma released a film called Mission: Impossible. Have you heard of it? It was a blockbuster remake of a 1960s TV series and it was a big hit.
This is the plot of Mission: Impossible: Tom Cruise plays a special agent of some sort named Ethan Hunt. For some reason he jumps through the glass of an aquarium and floods a European street, which leads to everybody on his team getting killed. Ethan's identity is erased and he's driven underground, where he reads the Bible and follows a series of clues that lead him to Ving Rhames. Ethan, Ving, and some other rogues team up and break into a CIA vault to steal something from a computer. This involves Ethan hanging from the ceiling like he's in a Michael Jackson video; he drops his knife but gets away without setting off any alarms. Everyone ends up on a train and gets into a fight. A twist happens and Ethan saves the day, but not before everyone climbs around the outside of the train and a helicopter flies into the Chunnel.
What was cool about 1996 was that no one seemed to understand the plot of Mission: Impossible, and everyone was in agreement that this was OK. “I’m sure I couldn’t pass a test on the plot,” wrote Roger Ebert. “My consolation is that the screenwriters probably couldn’t, either.” “[The] story doesn’t make a shred of sense on any number of levels,” wrote Stephen Holden for the New York Crimes. “What is not present,” summed up Time’s Richard Schickel’s, “is a plot that logically links all these events or characters with any discernible motives.”
Schickel’s review goes on to ask whether De Palma is a postmodernist or a cynic. It’s a great question. When Mission: Impossible came out, De Palma was 25 years into a career of action thrillers stuffed full of cinematic references, postmodern signposts, and dispassionate depravity. Mission: Impossible was his embrace of ‘90s glitz, and Tom Cruise was a perfect vessel for his project, a vacant leading man whose oddly generic energy was ideal for channeling post-structuralist “movie about movies” machinations. The resulting exercise was little more than an opportunity to string together a series of referential set pieces. If you think otherwise, re-watch the opening scene. Two men monitor a TV screen that shows a dead woman lying prone on a bed. The camera pulls back to reveal that they’re filming a set: the walls collapse, the silicone masks come off, and the woman wakes up, covered in fake blood and very much in on the act. This is classic De Palma, and the point, not to be too heavy-handed, is that what you see on a screen *isn’t real*. Action, whether it’s a covert sting or cinema, is acting, and everything that precedes it is just build-up to the set piece. You can read Mission: Impossible as meta-film or escapism or cynical cash-grab, but there’s no way to make a serious argument that the plot means a damn thing.
Between 22 May 1996 and 22 May 2025, Paramount Pictures released six more of these movies, none of them directed by De Palma. I don’t have the foggiest idea what any of them are about, but I assume they focus on Tom Cruise assembling a team to save the world from an evil McGuffin against unbelievable odds. For awhile they weren’t highly regarded, but something happened in the 2010s and suddenly they became an essential action franchise. We could spend a lot of time unpacking what happened in those 29 years, but where we’re at now is a film directed by Christopher McQuarrie called Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning that debuted at Cannes and features a pre-movie note from Tom Cruise about what a special cinematic event we’re about to experience.
This is the plot of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning: there’s a McGuffin called The Entity, a computer program that can only be taken down by combining three other McGuffins: a cruciform key, a thing that looks like an OtterBox, and a thumb drive called the Poison Pill. One of these McGuffins is on a submarine at the bottom of the ocean, one is in Ethan Hunt's pocket, and the third is on the neck of a villain named Gabriel who is even more devoid of personality than Ethan. To bring them together, Ethan needs to run pretty fast down a tunnel to get to the president to convince her to give him an aircraft carrier in order to get onto a helicopter from which he jumps onto a submarine where he commandeers a dive suit that he takes down to another submarine and then back up through a hole in the ice cap before going to South Africa where he runs even faster to finally hang onto an airplane that you’ve probably seen in the trailer. I’m not sure why any of this happens, but in their course the world nearly ends, only to be saved by Ethan plugging the thumb drive into the OtterBox while either crash-landing a plane or parachuting, I can’t really remember.
In theory, this plot is great. Here is the problem: the movie is almost three hours long. Here is the other problem: interspersed between all of these interesting interactions with large vehicles, The Final Reckoning contains equal parts 1.) anxiety spirals about the interaction between AI, politics, and nuclear annihilation, and 2.) clip compilations from the previous M:I films. In other words, this is a movie that not only insists that it’s accomplishing something important, but also suggests that the Mission: Impossible franchise as a whole has accomplished something important. This is an astounding proposition. Let’s dig into it.
AI stuff first. It's fine for an action movie to dwell on the anxieties of the day. We are currently living in a time when people are deeply not normal about AI, most of us falling on a spectrum between dreading that we’re two years away from SkyNet on one end., and wanting to murder everyone who resists building a computer that will eternally torture the captured memories of everyone who didn’t feed into its matrix on the other (I’m not going to link to either of these panic attacks; dig into your own AI anxiety yourself). Final Reckoning fits right into the MAN v. MACHINE bracket, setting up a human-ish MAN (Ethan) against a very non-human MACHINE. Much of this movie reads as direct commentary about the anxiety overloads that kicks off the second a person goes online (at one point, Ethan kicks the shit out of a guy while shouting, “You spend too much time on the internet!” It isn’t subtle). Beyond that, the film’s geo-political component suggests that the degeneration of the internet by AI has apocalyptic ramifications, leading to global misinformation that will bring us to the brink of nuclear war.
OK, fine. This is not a novel point and has been addressed many times before, but it’s a reasonable backdrop for an action movie. The problem with Final Reckoning is that it spends literally hours of plot on this ham-fisted and anxiety-making topic. We’ve got an entire secondary cast centered on President Angela Bassett Sorkin-ing around the war room. Spliced into that we have sloppy scenes of global unrest, endless images of nuclear arsenals, and a lengthy sequence in which Ethan hyperventilates through a direct confrontation with the anti-god AI. There is an argument for the moral utility of a film about the annihilation of the human race, but an M:I movie is not it. This is a movie that culminates in Tom Cruise punching a guy out of the sky and watching him get America’s Funniest Home Videos-ed to death on the tail of an aeroplane. It is not the space to indulge worries about existential threats to humanity.1
The other major issue with this film is, of course, the endless self-hagiography in the form of M:I Greatest Moments montages. I can’t undersell how much of this movie is made up of clips of previous films. They serve little dramatic purpose beyond providing reminders to set up silly bits of fan service. The nadir comes when an extra from the first film becomes an important character and, in an emotional scene, hands Ethan the knife he dropped during the iconic vault heist (when this happened, the man next to me gasped, “It’s his knife!” so maybe this works for some people.)
It's somewhat rich that a film so obsessed with its meta-narrative is the descendant of De Palma, the American godfather of cinematic meta-narrative obsession. But De Palma's films are filled with re-appropriations of cinematic tropes that aim to say something (cynical or otherwise) about the nature of cinema, not to provide winking fan service and self-celebration. When De Palma films Tom Cruise descending from the ceiling to rob a vault, he's imitating Jules Dassin, and in doing so making a quiet note about the continuity of the action genre; when Final Reckoning replays that scene (several dozen times), it's saying (screaming), "Remember when he did that? Wasn't that important?" De Palma knows that the vault sequence is a.) cool and b.) reductive, and his thesis is that this is all action movies can ever be. McQuarrie says, no, this was a foundational testament to the human spirit; we need to honor the memory and take this seriously.
If a movie takes itself this seriously, then it must be About Something. And though the driving plot of the film is the political chaos brought on by rogue AI, I don’t think that’s what it’s actually about. The real meaning is revealed before the film even starts, when Tom Cruise shows up to deliver his PSA about how we’re about to watch a film that is deeply meaningful to him and that, by coming to the theater to watch movies “as they’re meant to be seen,” we as audience are contributing to the cause of righteousness. It reads as an act of desperation, a plea to ordinary people to sustain the billion-dollar art of filmmaking, Hollywood gone PBS pledge drive. Of course AI is the Big Bad of the film: it’s a manifestation of the (reasonable) concern from filmmakers that LLMs will have a devastating impact on their art. Ethan Hunt might be the savior of the world, but Tom Cruise feels the call to be the savior of the movies, of art - of mankind against the machine.
Very serious stuff, but not serious enough not to set up a sequel. Final as the Reckoning is, it ends with a closing shot that completely undercuts the ethos of the movie and sets up a future film where Ethan Hunt becomes some sort of techno übermensch. High art though they might be, Paramount clearly wants to keep making money on these movies. Unfortunately they aren’t doing a good job at it: Final Reckoning didn’t make half as much in its opening weekend as Lilo & Stitch. It seems to me that they would have done better by sticking to the spirit of the first M:I film instead of showing endless clips from it. There's plenty in the box office to convince a person that fan-service and slop are the only routes towards full theaters, but there’s also a clear market out there for people who like movies when they function as movies. Final Reckoning, with its Cannes screenings and its aspect-ratio jokes, clearly wants to be that kind of movie. But when it lets itself become the bloated spawn of a Marvel and an Oscars speech instead, it transforms into a bore, on track to be replaced by slopification and worthy of nothing less. The world will never be saved if it takes three hours to do it. No one has time for that.
Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, pledging me money (thanks!), or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. I’ll be back next week with a review of something other than the new Karate Kid.
My reaction here is somewhat colored by my viewing experience. At the climax of the film, when Ethan makes his final move against The Entity, the college-age child in front of me shouted out either an obscure racial slur or "chicken jockey," leading me to spent the rest of the movie trying to figure out what the heck was up with that instead of paying attention to the actual resolution. There wasn't enough movie for me to be taken out of so I really couldn't care less, though I do wonder if I had some social responsibility to dump popcorn on the kid’s head.
This is astoundingly good stuff. It offers both savage wit and profundity. Like a forty-niner of yore, you extract precious ounces of meaning from tons of dross. One can only speculate about what you would have produced if you had seen all the MI films, and been free from a headache, a day job, and various other distractions. For comparison, I took a look at the San Francisco Chronicle’s review. It’s as bland and mealy as theater popcorn. Yours, on the other hand, is organic and deeply rooted in knowledge of far more than this (evidently) incoherent series of action films. Thank you.