MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: THE FINAL RECKONING is a religious parable about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence

“I need you to trust me, one last time.” 

It’s a busy weekend at the movies with Tom Cruise’s final adventure in his long-running franchise MISSION IMPOSSIBLE THE FINAL RECKONING and Disney’s live-action remake of the beloved LILO & STITCH, both power-housing the box office to a combined half-billion dollar holiday weekend stateside. 

Internationally, both films will have a field day through the next month until about mid-June when the horror-blockbuster 28 YEARS LATER and Brad Pitt’s racing drama F1 both release to cap off the first full month of summer.

The HUB in Tonkawa is currently showing both STITCH and FINAL RECKONING, so grab your tickets now. 

I had the pleasure of seeing Ethan Hunt’s farewell tour in IMAX over the weekend, and this final “Mission” is a fitting send-off to our favorite IMF operative as well as a (justified) ode to Cruise himself. 

Taking place months after 2023’s DEAD RECKONING, the world is collectively cowering in fear of The Entity, a god-like Artificial Intelligence which has spread disinformation through the world wide web, treating borders like grids on a chess board, putting every national power on Earth on high-alert as it spreads through the internet, slowly capturing every nuclear arsenal that it can. 

Deep in a non-digital analogue bunker in Virginia, the U.S. President (Angela Bassett reprising her role as Senator Sloane from M:I FALLOUT) and her cabinet of advisors are watching their literal Doomsday Clock tick down as The Entity captures one nuclear arsenal after another. 

The only way to stop this rogue anti-God AI is, of course, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his band of operatives. The mission is as follows: 

Locate the destroyed Russian submarine Sevastopol at the bottom of the arctic to recover The Entity’s Source Code, the only way that it can be dismantled, and using that to lure and trap The Entity in an external hard drive located in The Doomsday Vault, a South African bunker designed to withstand the world’s global annihilation. 

The catch? 

The IMF team has literal milliseconds to capture The Entity between when it harnesses the United States’ nuclear arsenal and entering The Doomsday Vault, where it can watch the world burn and live forever.

The literal blink of an eye is all that stands between us and extinction. 

To delve anymore into the plot of the gargantuan 3-hour adventure would give too much of the suspense away, but long-time fans of the franchise will have a rollicking good time with this insane adventure which some may find bloated in the same way others will find it oozing with flavor. 

In Hunt’s final adventure, we see a timely examination of a point that the seemingly omnipotent Cruise addressed in 2023’s DEAD RECKONING: the inherent danger and, in unchecked, apocalyptic ramifications of A.I. 

Cruise is no stranger to having the weight of the world on his shoulders- after all, the 62-year-old actor is essentially responsible for the real world “Mission Impossible” scenario of saving movie theaters from the clutches of an all-digital future during the COVID pandemic when it seemed like, despite some hits here and there, the theatrical landscape would never recover…

…until the Memorial Day 2022 release of TOP GUN MAVERICK, a film Cruise went to war with Paramount over when the studio wanted to release it on Paramount+, became the highest grossing holiday-weekend film of all time, and acted as a shot of adrenaline into the heart of both major studios and theatrical distributors.

Cruise, an ardent defender and die-hard supporter of the theatrical experience, shows us a world that is chillingly similar to our own in FINAL RECKONING: 

The Entity has the world locked in fear. Nations are paranoid, and even the people are terrified- they’ve left their jobs, their duties, to cower in fear of a neon god. Some, however, consider themselves acolytes- they welcome The Entity and the extinction-level promise of a world rewrote by the Anti-God itself. 

To combat a villain that can seemingly access everything- an all-knowing algorithm- the IMF and U.S. Government have taken shelter in a non-digital bunker, communicating through radio, notes, and other means, a “return to form” for both spycraft and information, as workers push small toys across battle maps to show Naval combat, echoing images of World War II films and old-school espionage thrillers. 

Going back in time, to an analogue past, we also see this play out meta-narratively as Hunt is granted permission to use the USS George H.W. Bush Aircraft Carrier, a real-life carrier which is scheduled to be retired in 2027. 

The USS George Bush is a non-digital craft, which of course echoes the imagery Cruise is best known for as Maverick in TOP GUN and the sequel, TOP GUN MAVERICK. 

From this “old school” ship and through a deep-water submarine mission so intense I forgot to breathe (literally, I choked on air), the final death-defying set piece of FINAL RECKONING takes us all the way back to the silent film era, which was 100% intentional, as a way of making audience realize what we stand to lose if the institution of cinema, if this algorithmic and grim dystopia, were to continue. 

The last breathless action scene is of Cruise pursuing villain Gabriel across the stunning vista of South Africa in a duel of biplanes so vibrant and jaw-dropping that it becomes an out-of-body experience so real that you don’t even notice that it is, essentially, a silent film. 

Gabriel and Hunt scream at each other. Their mouths move, but there are no subtitles or dubbed-over lines. There is only the thundering score and the sound of propellers and gusting wind. 

This, Cruise and director Chris McQuarrie seem to say, is cinema. This is what it is all about. When you strip down the rampant AI, the gadgets, the guns, the overly-chorographed hand-to-hand combat, this is what brought people to the movies then, and it is what brings them now. 

THE FINAL RECKONING is a massive ode to film, to Tom Cruise, and most importantly, to why we need to be more careful than ever of a digital age.