As anyone paying attention is already aware, Tom Cruise is probably a terrible person. His entire career depends on that “probably.” The occasional re-eruption of the ‘problematic artist’ debate will always rub up against him because of his ties to the cult of Scientology, but since there’s been no actual confirmed malfeasance on his part, even from those high-profile celebrities who have exited the Church, he’s never really been central to the debate. Everyone can agree he’s super creepy and probably genuinely insane, and his proximity to the center of Scientology means he’s at least aware of the terrible, terrible things it does (just look up Sea Org to start down that rabbit hole), but no one has any actual dirt on him.
The reason I bring this up is that if you want to examine contemporary film auteurs you absolutely have to include Tom Cruise in that discussion. We tend to focus that conversation on directors, maybe sometimes writers, but he makes a convincing case that some producers need to be included as well. He’s taken the playbook codified by Warren Beatty and, in typical Tom Cruise fashion, gone absolutely crazy with it. His producing filmography has been in in almost absolute lockstep with his acting filmography since 2006. While a producer credit can vary wildly in terms of what it actually means from actor to actor, the really big stars almost always get it thrown in these days as a kind of perk, a movie starring Tom Cruise is absolutely a Tom Cruise production. Notable flops like ‘The Mummy’ are the exception that proves the rule. He was not a producer on that one and you can absolutely count on him never making that mistake again. I doubt he will ever be involved in a franchise that he is not in complete control of going forward.
Film sequels have always been around, but it wasn’t until the 80’s and the influx of venture capital that they became ubiquitous. This is hardly new information, it was even noted at the time, but it’s interesting to see what’s been happening relatively recently with long-form film series. Previously the provenance of endless horror sequels, interesting things have been happening with blockbuster franchises once they get up around entry five or six. By which I principally mean the Mission: Impossible and Fast & Furious franchises, although you also have weird outliers like ‘Puss in Boots: The Last Wish’ and the upcoming John Wick spin offs. An argument could be made that the Marvel movies are basically all quasi-sequels. They even turned Daniel Craig’s Bond movies into direct successors to each other, heretofore unthinkable. Maybe ‘Avatar’ will eventually get there as well.
This also continues the recent trend of part ones (parts one?). Just this year we’ve had ‘Across the Spider-Verse,’ which I had problems with, and ‘Fast X,’ which I increasingly feel the need to also examine. In 2021 ‘Dune: Part 1’ did this as well so it’s not brand new (as an aside I haven’t seen that one yet for pandemic reasons, here’s hoping for an Imax re-release before part 2). Audiences seem to be accepting them all right, which is a trend I find unsettling. The only one with a proper cliffhanger ending was ‘Fast X,’ the rest just kind of … stopped happening.
I was slow to get into the ‘Mission: Impossible’ franchise (Missions: Impossible?). I saw part 2 in the theatre because of the involvement of John Woo, was relatively underwhelmed, and didn’t start paying attention to them again until around part 5, and that was only due to the increased prominence of Simon Pegg. I still haven’t seen part 1, which after this movie is frankly shameful, but I’ve caught up on the rest. I think everyone can now agree that the most important movie of all of them, and the one that cemented the identity of the franchise, was part 4. That solidified the key components of the movies going forwards: it surrounded Ethan Hunt with a team that followed him from film to film (beyond just Ving Rhames), did away with the notion that Hunt has any kind of interior life worth examining, and made the centerpiece of the movie an insane physical stunt actually performed by Tom Cruise. The subsequent sequels are variations on this formula, culminating, I would argue, with part 6, ‘Mission Impossible: Fallout.’
Since I’m not sure where else to cram this in, I’d like to argue that part 6’s opening weekend of $61,236,534 ($74,405,801.72 adjusted for inflation) beat the $54,688,347 opening of part 7 due almost entirely to that moment in the trailer when Henry Cavill cocks his arms like they’re guns. Man, that was a good trailer.
It’s become increasingly obvious that these movies are setpieces strung together by the barest whisps of plot. To their credit both Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie have been very open about the fact that they come up with the action sequences first and then reverse engineer the story. When done well one can reinforce the other, or at the very least not get in each other’s way. Oddly enough, one of the strengths of this movie ends up conflicting with this approach, in that for possibly the first time a Mission: Impossible movie actually has a thesis: the digital is inherently the enemy of the analogue.
This is basically an abstraction of the conflict in the previous movie between Cruise’s Hunt and Cavill’s Walker. Parts 4 through 6 form a loose sub-trilogy within the overall series, which makes sense considering that part 4 was when McQuarrie entered the series as one of the writers. For whatever reason, possibly Cruise’s insistence on being the center of the franchise, none of the films before part 6 have had particularly memorable villains, despite casting's best efforts. They’ve had such heavyweights as John Voigt, Phillip Seymore Hoffman, Michael Nyqvist, and Sean Harris (best Ian Curtis ever), but to me none of them hold a candle to Cavill’s Walker because he’s set up as an explicit contrast to Cruise’s Hunt. He’s physically much bigger, blunter, more prone to violence, and openly insults the devious methods that Hunt’s IMF uses from movie to movie. He’s directly set up as an attack on the entire ethos of the Mission: Impossible movies and the borderline goofy logic they use, so it’s very satisfying when he ends up with a helicopter hook to the forehead. Both he and The Syndicate he works for are dark reflections of Hunt and The IMF as a whole, and seeing them go to war over morals, goals, and methods worked very well.
In this movie the antagonist is an unseen AI referred to as The Entity. It’s embodied by its henchman Gabriel but too removed from any active conflict to really come across as a true foil to the good guys. Gabriel is played by Esai Morales, who is good in the part but who always seems to be slightly distracted and waiting to be told what to do by the likely digital voice whispering in his ear. This works well thematically but translates to the character being slightly uninteresting on screen. We don’t even witness him ‘killing’ Ilsa Faust, who I don’t believe is really dead anyways. They shove in some ‘flashbacks’ showing how he was involved in something bad in Hunt’s past, and it’s such a manufactured connection that I genuinely didn’t care.
Having this central thesis is one of the movie’s core strengths because it dovetails so well with the paratextual theme of the series as a whole and its insistence on practical stunts and actual locations. It also represents the quasi-existential threat AI now poses to the film industry in particular and art in general. Not that actual art is in much danger, just the ability of artists to make a living by creating it. No one is going to read an AI-written novel any time soon and gain anything genuinely meaningful from it. It’s very possible, however, that someone like James Patterson will sign his name over to a bot, feed it the five hundred novels already ghost-written under his name, and then we’ll have endless books churned out by “James Patterson” for the next fifty years. I just fell into a small rabbit hole reacquainting myself with the Doc Savage novels and the works of ‘Kenneth Robeson,’ a pen name for a handful of writers that turned out almost two hundred novels over a couple of decades, and machine learning just automates the entire process. That’s the actual danger of this machine learning garbage, that it has the potential to turn out so much slop so quickly and so cheaply that it will simply flood the market and collapse the entire thing.
So for the first time this 27-year-old franchise actually finds itself very culturally relevant, which means that when it fails to seriously interrogate the issue of AI and instead uses it as an excuse to string together a set of admittedly breath-taking feats of filmmaking, there’s a disconnect. Instead of waiting to see what Tom Cruise was about to do with that motorcycle I kinda wanted a scene where he, Benji, and Luther sit down and have a serious discussion on how this kind of technology could impact their version of spycraft. I never cared about whatever MacGuffin Dougray Scott had in part 2, but Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 1 made the rookie mistake of having a premise I actually found interesting.
During this latest round of publicity much has been made of Tom Cruise’s love of movies and his absolute drive to save the industry, particularly movie theaters, and at least in this I absolutely believe in his sincerity. Very little is known about his personal life, Cruise having learned his lesson from Oprah’s couch about ever letting anyone so much as glimpse the real him. What little we do know involves how much of his life is absorbed in watching, making, and thinking about movies. There are now stories about his attempts to modify the SAG-AFTRA strike terms to allow stars to participate in publicity for their upcoming movies, explicitly in an attempt to save theaters. I have to think that his antipathy to the extension of computer technology from mere special effects into even more sectors of the industry influenced the decision to make it the bad guy of his most central movie series, the films that will forever define his legacy. He’ll be remembered for many other roles, obviously, but anyone doing any kind of overview of Cruise’s career will absolutely be forced to grapple with this franchise, and he seems to be making the culmination of the series a firm stance against the increasingly destructive effects of the digital on art.
It’s a stance I agree with, but I’m not sure that the narrative of a Mission: Impossible movie is the right place to explore that threat. Much is made in the movie about the claim that this will ‘redefine’ right and wrong for hundreds of years of come, which is an odd framing of the actual threat of supposed AI, but I guess that’s how you make it the bad guy of a spy movie. The film has to jump through a bunch of hoops to prove both that The Entity is dangerous and difficult to fight. The most effective moments, for me, were when it was altering data in real time to erase people from surveillance or impersonate people during communications. That’s a more concrete showcase of its danger, but it doesn’t directly translate into existential threat, for me.
There’s also my continued annoyance at the proliferation of these ‘Part 1’ movies. ‘Dune’ kind of gets a pass in that it’s an adaptation of existing material, but did we really need 141 minutes to get Dom and Dom Jr. to the bottom of that about-to-explode dam? At the end of this movie all that’s really been accomplished is that Hunt and his team have obtained a fancy couple of keys, learned roughly what it unlocks, and pissed off a whole bunch of people. A lot of fun was had along the way, and I’ll always gladly accept more Team IMF on the screen (including Henry Czerny, who is a whole lot of the reason I now really want to see part 1), and I’m not remotely arguing that this was a bad movie, it’s just firmly in the middle of the pack as far as my enjoyment of Mission: Impossible movies go. There’s not that ‘fuck yeah!’ moment like Walker’s death in part 6 or Ethen spitting out “Mission accomplished!” in part 4.
I tell something of a lie, there was one moment that absolutely landed for the audience I watched it with: the beat after Hunt and Grace go tumbling down some stairs in their tiny car and somehow end in the opposite seats from where they started, to their visible bewilderment. That scene absolutely killed.
I’m starting to wonder if I’m just turning grumpier as I get older, or if I’m starting to get somewhat jaded by special effects extravaganzas. The only big-budget movie I’ve genuinely enjoyed with almost no reservations this year was ‘Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3,’ and that’s due almost entirely to the writing and acting. The visuals were there, and in as much as they made me forget that several of the characters were fully CGI they did their job, but that’s not what I was focused on. I haven’t seen the latest Indiana Jones movie yet, nor have I participated in the Barbenheimer phenomenon, and maybe low expectations for the former and the near-universal ecstasy at the latter will change my mind, but I’m starting to wonder how many more empty calories I’m willing to pay full box-office prices for when I keep feeling left vaguely unsatisfied at the end.
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