‘Mission: Impossible’ and Human Possibility

See Tom run. And swim, jump, fly, drive, dive, ride, fall, climb, crash, dangle …

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And yes, this one is sending on Thursday instead of my usual Friday. Trying something different this week!

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The Mission: Impossible movies are all about the action and stunts. The plots are mostly just the framework on which to hang all the action and stunts while much of the character development stems from the charisma of the cast.

None of that is a complaint. This film series—eight movies over the course of three decades—proves that even big, bombastic action movies can be passion projects crafted with skill and care. The filmmakers take the movies seriously in all the right ways. Not This is important work that will change the world, but rather The audience expects and deserves a good time, and we are obligated to deliver it.

The series concludes with the recently released Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. It’s not the high point of the series, and it didn’t need to be nearly three hours long. Nevertheless, it is a solid and fitting finale, as well as a reminder of what makes the series so great: high stakes, gripping tension, likable actors, and insane stunts that no sensible person should ever undertake.

Fortunately, we don’t have a sensible person carrying these movies. We have Tom Cruise, who returns as Ethan Hunt for the final time. But credit where credit is due: At age 62, Cruise is at least sensible enough to realize that he shouldn’t be playing this sort of role at age 63.

I don’t know if Cruise performed every last stunt himself, but he performed many. Regardless, he couldn’t have done any of this single-handedly. Director Christopher McQuarrie, stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood, their crews, and various stunt performers (and previous directors and crews) deserve credit for making it all possible. Cruise is still a madman for putting himself through all this, but you have to admire the commitment.

This movie has Ethan scuba diving through a flooded submarine and hanging off of single-engine airplanes while soaring through the air. Previous movies have had him scaling the world’s tallest skyscraper and riding a motorcycle off a cliff, as just a couple of examples.

Consider the amount of work and effort needed to film any one of these stunts. The logistics. The precautions. The risks. The skill. The ingenuity. And these stunts have been escalating over the course of eight movies.

The stunts are spectacles, but they’re mostly handcrafted spectacles with limited CGI assistance compared to other action series. Cruise and company dedicated themselves to authentic thrills and kept pushing themselves to new limits. They built these movies as something to experience in theaters, not as “content” to passively consume while multitasking. They immerse the audience in the action.

The main excitement of the Mission: Impossible movies isn’t whether Ethan and his team will save the day. We know they’re going to save the day. It’s how they do it. It’s That plan shouldn’t work, but somehow they’re pulling it off. And we have this amazing front-row seat as they pull it off.

The series started strong back in 1996. The first scene with Ving Rhames, who would become among the few series regulars as tech guy Luther, concludes with this exchange:

Luther: You really think we can do this?

Ethan: We’re going to do this.

That sums up the series nicely. The team cooks up a wild plan in which any number of things could go wrong. And things do go wrong. But they adapt and persevere until they ultimately succeed.

The new movie gives Ethan a bit more plot armor than before, especially in the submarine, but the sequence with the airplanes is masterful. He’s maneuvering around airplanes in flight like he’s Batman, but it feels just plausible enough. The sequence carries the weight of solid reality. Mission: Impossible thrives when it reaches into the upper limits of what’s physically possible for a man without magic or superpowers.

In the final two movies, the main threat is an evil AI program, which initially felt like the wrong sort of opponent for this kind of series. Too big, too sci-fi (albeit less sci-fi than it used to be). But thinking about it some more, I’ve changed my mind. AI is actually an appropriate villain to cap off a series that’s very much about human skill and tenacity.

Watch Final Reckoning on the big screen to see what people can do.

Terrific Returns

My superhero prose series, Terrific, returns for a new volume this Sunday, June 1. As with the previous volume, I’m serializing it here first, and each chapter will be free to read until I compile it all in a paperback book later on.

If you do not want to receive these chapters, simply adjust your account settings by deselecting “Terrific.” If you prefer physical books, I completely understand—and I have three of those for your consideration. (Thank you to everyone who has already read them!) Otherwise, keep an eye out for a new chapter this Sunday!