Set to make at least $235 million globally by the end of the long weekend, Tom Cruise's eighth Mission: Impossible film is a commercial success.
His willingness to do his own stunts, combined with an excellent crew, definitely set a new bar in this film for action movies.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
Seeing this film in IMAX was worth the extra money. If you like insane spy thrillers where the fate of the world hangs in the balance, then you will absolutely enjoy Final Reckoning. There's no woke stuff: Just raw action where good and evil have to face off against each other in a world of choices and consequences.
But I'm not here to give a technical analysis of the film. Plenty of other people will break down those aspects of the movie.
Instead, I want to focus on the message.
My favorite line of the movie had to be this:
What that scene looked like:
The rest of the movie's message builds on that statement, and with surprising depth.
Final Reckoning had philosophical undertones that the rest of the series didn't. In some places, it made the pacing a bit too nostalgic and moody (particularly in the first half of the film). In others, it made the audience grapple with how our own choices define us.
🚨 [Mild Spoilers follow for those who did not see the previous film(s)]
If you watched the last movie, Dead Reckoning, you know that the big bad in the new film is an artificial intelligence called "The Entity." As far as sci-fi plots involving A.I. go, I've seen shows and films that better portray the concept of sentient machines.
But a statement on A.I. isn't really the point of Dead Reckoning. This isn't an Isaac Asimov adaptation commenting on the particular dangers of machine learning or the laws of robotics. This movie is about the choices that humans make and how we either succeed together or fall divided.
Throughout the past two films, and in the third film of the franchise, there is the theme of humanity creating its own destroyers. The A.I. is referred to as an "anti-god" that has "written" the fate of humans through its own algorithmic calculations.
This anti-god is a deceiver that tricked a submarine crew into blowing itself up. At one point, it is referred to with a name that is awfully close to the "Father of Lies," one of the Bible's names for Satan. The A.I. spends time editing photos, videos, and narratives on the internet to spin the world into paranoia, until nuclear war is almost certain.
Sean Burns for Boston's WBUR said it well:
...the movie is adorably earnest in its insistence that we the people need to start trusting and listening to each other again if we want to avert a digital apocalypse.
The message of working together as humans rather than becoming addicted to machines that are being leveraged to divide and destroy us is a good one. Sites like Not the Bee were started in the midst of a mass propaganda campaign to control the masses during the spread of a virus that escaped a Chinese lab. The world has spent the last 5 years arguing online more than ever, and as we stand at the brink of A.I. video generation that is indistinguishable from real people, it begs the question whether there will be any genuine truth or human interaction on the internet in just a handful of years.
But there's a deeper message in the film that is a combination of concerning and incomplete.
At one point, Cruise's Ethan Hunt listens to a message from a teammate, Luther, that gets to the heart of the film's message: That humans are capable of becoming gods as much as they are making anti-gods.
Luther reflects on Ethan Hunt with an almost messianic obsession. As Sean Burns astutely notes, "There are films about the life of Christ that spend less time proclaiming the divinity of their protagonist."
Perhaps it's the Scientology of Tom Cruise bleeding into the film, but Ethan Hunt is portrayed as a god-like, mythological character. As Ohio State Professor Hugh Urban noted in a 2011 book, Scientology says religious teachings are distractions meant to make us forget our "own godlike power to create and destroy universes."
Ethan Hunt surely seems to fit the bill. He is treated as the only person who can save the planet and the only person who can wield the power that governments can't be trusted with. He is, for all intents and purposes, the Christ figure of the Mission: Impossible franchise.
In actuality, Cruise's own beliefs are likely an undercurrent amid a wider Hollywood message of finding your own truth and inner power, combined with the teaching that disagreement and discord are the source of ultimate evil (notice how Disney films don't have villains these days?).
When Luther tells Ethan that "nothing is written" in celebration of man's free will, Ethan is shown staring over the vast horizon as though he is pondering the future of man.
Yet the message that man can become gods through togetherness is not the "anti-god." The film rightly notes that Satan wants to, as the Bible says, "steal, kill, and destroy" the human race. The Bible also says that humans are made in God's image. We are unique beyond measure, to the point where those who obey God are called his children.
The idea that mankind can attain godhood on his own, as it were, by working together in harmony is not the antidote to this. Haven't you heard of the Tower of Babel?
The "anti-god" can destroy humanity through inclusivity, kindness, and teamwork if those attributes are focused on glorifying humanity instead of God. The true antidote to the "anti-god," then, is not teamwork and introspection, but an acknowledgement that God created and ordered the universe, appoints the times and places that everything will happen, and is good and loving on top of it all.
Luther and Ethan are wrong: Everything is written. It just isn't written by Satan or artificial intelligence or some other hubris of man.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to believe this:
Everything is written by a Heavenly Father who loves us, and completed a seemingly impossible mission of saving us from our own rebellion ... with hope beyond hope in store for those who believe.
'Look, I am about to do something new; even now it is coming. Do you not see it? Indeed, I will make a way in the wilderness, rivers in the desert.' - Isaiah 43:19
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.
