Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
PARAMOUNT
Society is entering a dark age of untruth. Whether it is the spread of disinformation on social media, the infectious disease of extremist ideologies, as well as the rampant use of AI-generated images, videos, and text, it is becoming harder and harder to believe in the world and the people that it surrounds. Things are likely only to get worse as time goes on, which is why audiences and society need to collectively unite and support those who are seeking to fight this darkness of misinformation and paranoia with a shining light of hope and honesty.
This is what Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is truly about. Marred with endless reshoots dictated by the COVID pandemic, writers’ and actors’ strike, and the financial disappointment of Dead Reckoning, it is a miracle that the film came out as coherent as it is. Sure, the coherence is occasionally flimsy, with an overstuffed cast that spends the majority of the first hour saying many things and doing very little. But the exposition, something that writer-director Christopher McQuarrie saw as a necessary evil rather than something he genuinely enjoys, has never been more filled with doom and gloom.
For all intents and purposes, The Final Reckoning is a nigh-apocalyptic film. A core part of the Mission: Impossible series has been to have each film feel different from the previous one, something that McQuarrie (the only one to direct multiple entries) has taken to heart. If the previous films were characterised by exotic and lavish locales around the world, from the foggy streets of Venice to the crowded streets of Shanghai. Here, that memory of the beauties people have built over the centuries, is gone: outside of the opening act set in a London that is closer to 28 Days Later than the finale of Rogue Nation, the action takes place in military bunkers on the verge of DEFCON 1, Arctic cabins, flooded submarines, and South African mines.
The growing sense of claustrophobia told through the world-ending narrative is wonderfully captured by Fraser Taggart, trading the Dutch angles and overly digital look of Dead Reckoning for a more classical approach, one worthy of a supposed final entry. From the opening scene until the very last shot, The Final Reckoning does serve as a celebration of the work that Tom Cruise and everyone else have put into this series. While there are multiple instances in which the call-backs border on the unnecessary (making one character related to someone from a previous film is wholly gratuitous), it does play into the story’s elegiac tone, bringing things full circle in more or less satisfying ways. Every new and old addition to the cast brings an emotional heft to the piece that is seldom seen in the eighth entry of a franchise.
Under McQuarrie’s direction (including when he helped rewrite parts of Ghost Protocol back in 2011), the series motto became, “We’ll figure it out”. The frantic, unfocused nature of these productions can make or break the experience for some, yet it ultimately lends itself perfectly to not only the unexpected problems that the IMF faces, but that the film crew itself has to figure out. With more and more series relying on digital tools to simplify the filmmaking process, especially with the aid of AI, it is commendable and needed for someone like Cruise and McQuarrie to push for practical, on-location shooting. What is even more important is to make the tension of the set-pieces feel palpable, something that is masterfully accomplished here.
For the first time since scaling the Burj Khalifa, the action scenes of Final Reckoning look and feel as clean as they could, with minimal digital trickery to change backdrops or touch up the environments. What is even more impressive is that they honed in on two specific sequences: if Dead Reckoning could be criticized for having one too many set-pieces (an airport foot chase, a car chase in Rome, the nightmarish maze in Venice, and the three-part train sequence), here there are just two big ones. This helps keep the narrative fully on track, with a very clear goal (for those able to keep in their minds the information overload) that is incredibly stressful, as more and more practical headaches are thrown against the team.
The climactic biplane chase is instantly a highlight of the series, using the documentary-style filming of the ending of Fallout to even greater heights as Cruise hangs for his life while a plane twists and turns around narrow cliffs. But personally, the underwater descent to the sunken Sevastopol is the more stressful watch: with just one line of dialogue in a 20-minute sequence, the tone shifts from adventure to horror as Ethan Hunt floats his way through a submarine filled with cadavers, on the verge of rolling off in the abyss. You could hear a pin drop at the sold-out IMAX screening, everyone holding their breath and not eating popcorn, knowing full well that everything would be fine yet still being fully invested in whether Hunt could make it. The moment-to-moment intensity is more important than any grander narrative scheme: the lack of clarity is a feature, not a bug, the filmmakers fully believing that viewers will get sucked up in each scene’s emotional and narrative thrust to engage with the piece as a whole.
That is the magic of Mission: Impossible as a whole, and even for The Final Reckoning. Despite being a messy film that features too many characters (both new and old, some welcome, such as Rolf Saxon’s Donloe, others like Hannah Waddingham’s Admiral Neely less so) and an over-reliance on flashbacks in its opening act, it is precisely what audiences worldwide need to be reminded of. They need to be reminded of the importance of hope, trust, that there are good people out there fighting the good fight, and that we ourselves should strive to do good. If we all lose trust in one another, we get closer to a metaphorical human annihilation. Sometimes, true bravery comes from believing in someone, asking for their help and believing that they can bring positive change in the world. In this case, we trust Tom Cruise that he can single-handedly save practical blockbuster filmmaking, pushing back against the proliferation of AI and digital fakery, and embracing the importance of truth in this dark age.