2025, Christopher McQuarrie (Jack Reacher) -- download
Muse or captor?
I am sort of assuming this will be the last of the "M:I" movies given its been 30 years of movies, and despite McQuarrie's comments saying otherwise, its about time, no?
I was determined to watch this movie as I have watched all of them before -- with a sort of detached enjoyment for the sheer spectacle of it all. But given I have only previously written about three of the eight (Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, and Dead Reckoning), I have not had the chance to ramble on about my initial dislike for the whole thing, until I aged and replaced heated opinions with "meh" and maybe even tempered ironic joy.
I wish the Search in Blogger was better; entering in "Mission:Impossible" just led to too much, and I ended up settling on "Cruise" to find the three.
You will note, your "tempered ironic joy" is more than a little peppered by annoyance. So, maybe that initial dislike lives through age.
When the first came out, I was deep in my That Guy stage of film watching. I recall not being all that interested in them, but I likely was also in my "see every single released movie" stage, so I did... see them. I was likely OK with them, dealt with my dislike for Cruise and spectacle (i.e. Bay-splosions) movies. Now in my "old age", they have become a sort of nostalgic action-espionage-lone-tough-guy series, akin to be the James Bond of the last thirty years, like classic Bond-movies were when I was younger.
Not sure I want to expand further. Maybe later, if I choose to do another rewatch and a "series minded" post like Kent's. Probably not.
When we last left our intrepid hero (and as Kent has pointed out, these movies have become entirely about one person -- Ethan), in this intentionally split movie, he had recovered the Cuneiform Key and.... and what, I am not sure. Even re-reading my post on the movie, I was not sure. We know the Key had something to do with a Russian sub that, despite its really advanced AI-powered defense system, had been tricked into launching a torpedo against itself, and sunk below the icey waters. But the key, in two pieces on chains on people's necks, floated up to be discovered by someone, so it could become a MacGuffin for the first half of the movie. What we do know is that the Key offers assistance in controlling an Evil AI that Ethan will not trust into any government's hands, not even his own. So, that means, you guessed it, he is disavowed again.
Uh dude, its "cruciform" not "cuneiform". The latter is writing system used in Mesopotamia while the former just means "the form of a cross". I honestly would prefer they wedge some weird pseudo-historical reason into the naming of the key instead of just saying "its cross shaped" but ... sure, cruciform does sound neat.
But in this new movie, the AI has been making vast strides to taking over the world. In an entirely unexpected superhero-movie level plot, shit has escalated so quickly and so dire-ly that it won't be long before all nuclear super-powers are controlled by the Evil AI which has been named The Entity, and will launch The Missiles, ending humanity.
Cue head-canon where The Entity is actually Skynet and Ethan Hunt will eventually spawn John Connor by going back in time to the 80s.
Ethan (Tom Cruise, Risky Business) really wants to find Gabriel (Esai Morales, La Bamba), his arch-nemesis (for reasons) who once worked directly for The Entity, but is now on the run, having been disavowed by The Entity. But he needs a few more people to pretend it isn't just him doing everything, so he breaks Paris (Gabriel's once hench-person; Pom Klementieff, Une pure affaire) out of jail, and simultaneously convinces one of her handlers, Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis, Woke), to come along for the fun -- I do not know why he is in the movie (because they wanted to have someone named Tarzan in the credits?). They do find Gabriel but in turn, Ethan and Grace (Hayley Atwell, The Prisoner) are captured, so we can get some very intense staring between the two, a natural progression of the googley eyes from the previous movie.
They escape, but they also learn about Gabriel's method for communicating with The Entity, a tech-coffin that was apparently developed from the same, but different, MacGuffin as The Entity itself -- the Rabbit's Foot, the thing they were chasing after in Mission: Impossible III which we all thought was supposed to be a bio-weapon because a) it had a biohazard sticker, and b) they called it the anti-God (i.e. anti creator). Whatever, CALL BACK !! Ethan goes into the tech-coffin and gets a glorious depiction on exactly how and why The Entity will end the world. i.e. a re-working of Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The Entity also points out to him that Luther (Ving Rhames, Lilo & Stitch), who is apparently hacking together an anti-Entity virus will likely die, if not from the cancer he suddenly has, then from the (in)actions of Ethan, BUT if Ethan lets him to the digital equivalent of the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, things might be different. Ethan's all nuh-uhhhhh.
Cue Ethan running away saying "shit shit shit shit shit shit". Also, cue the constant paradox of the movies stating Only Ethan Can Prevent Forest Fires while constantly accusing him of being willing to sacrifice the entire world to protect his team.
Ethan decides he has to find the Russian Sub from the last movie, because from it, he can find The Entity's source code which will help... defeat it? Things get a bit convoluted here. The anti-Entity virus, or Poison Pill that Luther made, needs to be combined with The Entity's source code, which can only be found in the sunken sub. I can only assume that because The Entity is already out there, in the Internet, that blowing up the sub would accomplish nothing. Either way, the prediction comes true, as Gabriel steals the Poison Pill, blows Luther up and runs away.
Cue Ethan screaming with a Kirk "Khaaaaaaan" face.
Ethan and crew are taken into custody and brought before the POTUS, who is Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett, Strange Days) from previous movies. The US and a few other countries have a choice. They can preemptive strike before The Entity takes over all other countries and nukes them, or they can trust Ethan. Only Ethan. There is a bit of fun recollecting of all the other times he has saved the world, but with a good amount of collateral damage (e.g. The Kremlin go boom, fall down) doing the usual thing of ignoring the question of what would have happened if he hadn't been there at all. This again brings this movie back into superhero realms -- if The Avengers hadn't been around, things would have been much much worse, but they still get blamed for being the catalyst, not the protector.
Hmmmm, Ethan is the new Captain America?
They give Ethan an aircraft carrier with Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham, Coupling) as Admiral Neely, to help him find the sunken sub that nobody knows the location of, while the world is on the verge of nuclear Armageddon. Also, just so we don't forget that Ethan does have a team, they send the rest to a remote Canadian island with some sort of listening post that probably knows the actual location of the sub; maybe. To keep The Entity from knowing they are close to its source code, they will transmit the coordinates via analog morse code. Fun!
Also, they do a double-fun callback to the guy who lost his job because Ethan broke into his unbreak-in-able data vault all the way back in the FIRST MOVIE !! CALL BACK !!!
So, Ethan gets dumped by Rebecca into the frigid waters where he is picked by a US submarine run by a very nice man with a very nice voice, and provided with some equipment to go down to the Russian submarine, because they got the requested coordinates at the very very last second. This is the best sequence in the whole movie, as Ethan climbs into the mostly still sealed sub, to pry the source code of The Entity from its protected container shell, before the dislodging submarine slides off the continental shelf into oblivion. And just because the stakes aren't high enough, Ethan has to strip off his protective deep dive suit in order to escape the sub, but that means... the bends + freezing to death + running out of oxygen. No matter, Grace has appeared above to heal him with the power of her googley eyes, and the portable decompression chamber she brought along. He has what he came for, a funky MacGuffin doodad that...
To be honest, I am not sure how this whole Rube Goldberg Linkin' Logs idea actually works, or how it got formulated. The idea is that Luther's Poison Pill plugs into the Podkova (the doodad Ethan just recovered) as if Luther knew the interface, and they will do it in the Digital Seed Vault, which will attract The Entity (because it wants to hang out in the Seed Vault while it destroys the world) while they use a fabulous crystal storage drive to CAPTURE The Entity.
Its all rather wonderful Star-Trekian technobabble which makes no sense, but leads to another daring chase scene after Gabriel steals the Poison Pill and flies off in a colourful plane, and Ethan follows in another colourful plane. Also, Benji's (Simon Pegg, Spaced) been shot so Paris has to operate on him (the whole pen as a breathing hole trick) while Grace performs some crash course networking. Ethan catches Gabriel, punches it out in a crashing plane, plugs Tab A into Slot B (these devices have some fantastic wireless connectivity distance) and Grace captures The Entity in its glittery crystal cage.
I think the Internet was supposed to have been destroyed by this action? Either way the world has not been nuked, and everyone is happy. Ethan is un-disavowed for the umpteenth time. Until the next movie.
Yah, I went into the movie more than a little gleeful and optimistic despite my annoyance with... well, all the last ones. I guess my rose-coloured glasses for silly spectacle were firmly on despite Kent's dire warning. I didn't hate it because it is silly fun, but.... c'mon folks, after thirty years, you think they could do some more tight instead of extreme loosey-goosey to the n-th degree.
Congratulations for not harping on Tom Cruise's desire to be shirtless (he's looking kind of Wolverine squat and square in his old age) and only a wafer-thin reference to Tom Cruise Running, though it was once again very very prevalent in the movie.
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