Surprise: Jett and Gareth love it. The Final Reckoning somehow evokes Lawrence of Arabia, The Abyss, and Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe while remaining very much a Mission: Impossible movie. The conversation considers spectacle, sacrifice, the series as a whole, and why some gigantic movies still feel unexpectedly personal.
-
Wow, this film, Gareth, what a surprise.
I've never quite seen Tom Cruise as a person who had something to say to the world. Obviously, he's the most famous and most popular movie star, and as people say, the last movie star.
But I actually came away from this film with a respect for what he seems to be thinking about.
Oh, my goodness, dear listeners, it's not often I'm surprised when I go to the movies. You know, I've seen a lot of movies. I talk about movies professionally with my fine co-host, Dr.
Gareth Higgins, who's with me right now. I went into the movie theater the other day. I was expecting kind of a, uh, experience, but I got an, oh, experience.
And I'm talking about, for me, the most surprising cinematic, maybe almost the most rewarding if it wasn't for Sinners, cinematic experience I've had this year. We're talking Mission colon impossible, hyphen, the final reckoning.
This is The Film Talk. I'm Jett Loe.
Gareth Higgins, the conversation never ends. I am fascinated and curious to hear that you were expecting an, uh, but you got an, oh.
Hopefully in this episode, we'll be able to discuss the difference between an, oh, and an, uh, whether there's a chasm of difference, or we have to parse it. I had an, oh, experience with this film, too. In fact, I think I had the entire alphabet.
Uh, some letters more, uh, uh, than once. It's a, it's a thrilling, exciting film. We're not going to talk about it just yet.
We do want to let you know, dear listener, of an innovation, an innovation in The Film Talk. Um, uh, a dear, faithful and loyal listener has given us some feedback and suggested that we should tell you all there will be spoilers, uh, in the episodes.
And in order to make that, uh, really clear, what we'll do is we'll talk a little bit about the film, and we'll have a clip, and then after the clip there'll be spoilers.
So, uh, after the clip, if you don't want spoilers, go see the movie and then listen to the episode, perhaps on the way home. If you don't mind spoilers, listen to the episode anyway.
And if you don't have any intention of seeing the film, perhaps listening to the episode might encourage you to go see it. How does that sound, Jett?
That all makes sense to me. I would hate for to have this film. I went in cold, you know, I don't watch trailers.
I no longer read the trades. Wear a jacket, if at all possible. Wear a jacket.
Yes, he went in cold.
Oh boy, these are the jokes, folks.
Gareth Higgins.
This is why it's not called The Comedy Talk.
Hey, the important thing is that you're trying. You know, the important thing. So we gotta, here's the thing.
So no spoilers for the movie, but this is called The Final Reckoning and it retcons, as they say, the kids say, my other films in the series. So it kind of, it makes the, and this is, it does it a really hard thing to do.
A lot of movies try this and they fail. It makes all the other films better because it introduces the themes of this picture into the other films. Okay.
Maybe not, maybe not Mission colon.
It perhaps, it perhaps makes us remember them more fondly, but not necessarily want to go back and see them again.
Oh, well, okay. Cause I did that in preparation for this episode.
I did that.
Oh my goodness.
I watched the first three or four.
Were you surprised to see Millich from Eyes Wide Shut acting with Tom Cruise again in Mission, Mission colon Impossible 2?
I listen and Brendan Gleeson as well. I think you're talking of course about Rada Sirbedzidzija. I'm hoping I'm pronouncing his name correctly.
I was surprised to see him.
Okay. Let's quickly, quickly, quickly. We'll go through and rank the previous, is it seven?
They begin to blur together, which is another issue I have, which we can talk about after the, when we get into the spoiler areas. But let's-
So when we're ranking them, say the title and then you got to say like a phrase about the content of the story of that film so that people will remember. And we can each say a phrase or maybe one of us will be the one that has to say a phrase.
So let's start with Mission Impossible, 1996.
This is the one with Manon of The Spring. She gets...
Yes, Emmanuel Bayard.
Emmanuel Bayard. This is the one directed by Brian De Palma. Pretty good director.
Well, you know, here's the thing. I think about the great producer, Walter Hill, and now that I think about it, Gareth, this episode may be hours long. I am so sorry.
I hope not.
You know, Walter Hill, the people that did the...
He produced like the Alien Pictures. They made the real smart choice that every Alien movie would have a really interesting director, right? So you had Ridley Scott, then you had Cameron, James Cameron.
Then you had David Fincher. Then you had, is it John Deere? Junet for Alien 4.
And so it sort of felt when this series of Mission Impossible movies started, they're gonna do the same thing, right? Cause we get Brian De Palma, then we get John Woo. Then we get JJ Abrams.
Then we get Brad Bird, you know, the Incredibles.
All directors with a signature style.
Yes, and then that goes away. And then we get Christopher, well, we get Christopher McQuarrie. And that's sort of, to me, it sort of becomes like the Harry Potter films, because the Harry Potter films had Chris Columbus.
And then you had Alfonso Cuarón. Then you had, was it David?
Mike Newell.
Mike Newell. But then David Yates did all the next four. And then they just sort of all blend together.
Don't you feel that Chris, that McQuarrie has like, we've literally, we've seen him build his own craft in these last four films.
I mean, he directed a couple of films before the first Mission Impossible that he did. And this like, well, I don't want to talk about it. We're not going to talk about The Final Reckoning till after the clip.
Yes, this is why this episode is going to take three hours.
All right. But the first Mission Impossible, what's fun about it? And boy, I don't know how to talk about this without spoiling.
We didn't say that we wouldn't spoil the previous films.
Well, without spoiling this...
Well, okay, we'll get it. I won't spoil it then. All right.
Okay.
So, you know, this is the one where members of the original cast, some were furious with it because that's an ensemble show and in here, what happens right at the beginning, we kill off all the Mission Impossible team except for our main character,
And it also turns out that the kind of father of the Impossible Mission Force is a bad guy.
Well, and this is the thing, and this sort of felt like, I mean, that makes it surprising, but they kept the same character name.
So here was our hero for years of the very famous American TV show Mission Impossible. And now he's the same character, Jim Phelps, and turns out to be a traitor. Again, I can't spoil stuff for the new film.
We'll get into it after the clip. If I'm following Gareth's concept correctly, or the listener's concept correctly. This film, hey, it's a good movie.
And it feels very European, very French, not just because of Manion of the Spring.
It was, I remember the exciting Tom Cruise, you know, you call it rappelling whenever you're horizontal, I don't know, going down into that thing with the computer.
Hanging, he's hanging.
He's hanging, okay. Well, I thought he was like, I'm gonna call it, he's being rappelled. So of course, you know, the Palma film, lots of visual flair and not squeamish about violence, not squeamish about violence at all.
Well, and this has a weird tone though, right?
Because there's a, we see Martin Sheen's son, Emilio Estevez, Emilio Estevez. Thank you, Epoman, great, great motion picture. Get Killed is like a final destination film.
It feels horrible. It feels totally out of place. And I think a lot of people were upset.
It's horrible, not a spoiler.
That image is repeated twice in the new film as well. Okay, Mission Impossible 2, John Woo.
What I remember about that is you get your Brendan Gleeson, pharmaceutical virus, also strangely enough, a character, a film written by Robert, Robert Towne, who of course co-wrote Chinatown.
Brendan Gleeson playing an Irish pharmaceutical maven, I guess, whose name is a mashup of the names of the two senior figures of one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in Ireland. Strange inside baseball there.
You have your millets from Eyes Wide Shut. You got your masks. You got Dougray Scott.
You got Tandy Wayne Newton. You got an absurdly insane car chase in which it looks like Ethan Hunt is trying to kill himself and her at the same time. Who's this, what do you call not the secretary?
The guy that sort of, the person that always tells them what their missions are.
He might be called Mr. Secretary. No, no, no, no.
He always invokes a secretary and it's always a he.
I don't know.
It's Anthony Hopkins in this film.
What's the job title? Messenger?
Guy on the tape recorder in the original TV show.
The one who says the secretary will disavow, so surely the secretary themselves wouldn't refer to themselves in the third person.
Maybe that's one of his quirks.
I judge these films based on whoever plays that role. And... except in this case.
Much as I like Anthony Hopkins, I couldn't get through Mission Impossible 2 when I tried to watch it again the other week.
I think this is universally considered the least successful, shall we put it, of the motion pictures. And it sort of felt like, oh, this... Maybe this just killed them all off, and then JJ.
Abrams brought it back. It's a very strange film. And I kind of wonder, you know, as a kid, we had, in the old days, we had VHS tapes, right, as a child.
And we had like bootleg John Woo films from Asia. This is before it became big in the US. And I'm wondering now if we loved all these, his films, because we exoticized that they were from Asia, because they were dubbed or subtitled.
And then when John Woo came to the United States and made films in English, you look at them and go, well, these are... The cheesiness doesn't work. It doesn't translate, if that makes sense.
So I'm wondering if we as kids had some issue there.
This is a very strange film, because you have this meshing of John Woo, with his slow mo and his doves and over the top action, with a Robert Town script that is clearly modeled after the Alfred Hitchcock classic Notorious.
It's very, in the same way that Barb Dwyer, the sci-fi film starring Pamela Anderson, is clearly a remake of Casablanca. So it's very, very strange film that doesn't succeed.
And it's also notorious because it came off of I's White Shut, which went on so long that this film got delayed. And Dougray Scott famously, he's the villain in this film, couldn't fulfill his obligations to play Wolverine in the X-Men movie.
And one of the producers of the X-Men movie happened to be at Broadway production of Oklahoma and saw the guy playing Curly and said, that's our guy, Hugh Jackman. So responsible for the huge success of Hugh Jackman. Not a good movie.
Should we go on to Mission colon Impossible 3 with three, it's not the number three, like Mission colon Impossible 2, it's three, like three I's or three L's.
For deep cut fans of The Film Talk, you will know that Mission Impossible 3 was the very first film that Jett and I ever discussed on a podcast, but not this one, not this one. Jett's previous podcast, Letter to America, we talked about it.
I remember standing in your apartment in Belfast and recording. You had me stand on the other side of the room. I don't remember what we said about it.
I did watch it the other week. It's a bleak film. It's the first film in which you believe that Ethan Hunt has a substantial relationship with a life partner.
The deaths in this film, you really feel them. There is an absolutely horrendous death of Kerry Russell's character at the very start of the film.
There is a sense of the gravity of the world being felt through the gravity of the potential loss of the person you love the most. This is the dilemma at the heart of Ethan Hunt's life.
Do you save the world and potentially sacrifice your friends and loved ones, or do you save your friends and loved ones and potentially sacrifice the world?
Great bad guy in the form of Philip Seymour Hoffman, really cruel and not comical, not in the way that a lot of Bond villains feel like caricatures. This is not a caricature. This person feels like he could exist.
And I like this film a lot. Is Anthony Hopkins still the guy who sends them the messages, or is it Tom Wilkinson by that point?
Well, you can always see that any job that Anthony Hopkins did actually, well, if he was a civil servant and he retired, he would be succeeded by Tom Wilkinson.
Do you think they would miss the employees? Would they miss Anthony Hopkins, or was he kind of like a hard ass?
I don't know. I mean, I would like to, I mean, God rest Tom Wilkinson. I would quite like him to be my boss.
Warm and approachable.
Very much so.
Affable.
You feel that Wilkinson is an affable boss. You know, can you say Mission before we get a derail, becomes a Wilkinson talk. You mentioned Philip Seymour Hoffman.
There's a scene, you know, you blink and you'll miss it. They're at a party. And the way that Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the villain, refuses a drink from a waiter, is just, it's bone chilling.
This man is just full of contempt. He's so smart. He's contemptuous of others.
And as Gareth says, you feel like, oh, there's people like this in the world. And obviously what a loss to lose Philip Seymour Hoffman. But he just brings the whole film up.
The film is directed with such gusto and vigor by JJ Abrams. And it's so slick.
This sort of revitalized, I would imagine, even though it was years later until we get the next one, sort of revitalized or showed the way forward that these films could be really successful.
It's a really slick piece of bleak, as Gareth says, a slick piece of inner team.
Moving into the fourth film directed by Brad Bird, who made Ratatouille and also what I think is one of the great films of the last greatest year in US American cinema in 1999. And that is The Iron Giant. And number four moves like a cartoon.
It's the first one that sort of feels like a roadrunner, Tom and Jerry. And there's kind of a lightness of touch. And I remembered nothing else about it.
What do you remember about number four? Is this Ghost Protocol?
This is, is it hyphen Ghost Protocol?
I think it is. Is this the one he's in the building in Dubai? Calcum powder on his hands, jumping around.
Yes.
And this shows you the sort of the, the influence of Pixar. You could see that he comes from the Pixar stable because when he is on those of the Burj Khalifa, he's got magnetic gloves and one flies off.
And then you see it, it comes back with a little sound when it's right out of a Pixar film. And it's a lovely bit of comedy. This one is propulsive, another slick piece of entertainment with a very typical Brad Bird humor and it's worth watching.
Now we're going to get into trouble with the next ones though. So now we're getting into Christopher McQuarrie, the Mission Cold War.
What's the we? I mean, I know we are like Luther, I am loyal to you, but I want to hear what it is we're going to get into trouble for.
Do you know that because, talk about Luther Ving Rhames, because of his contract, sort of a pay or play thing, I think he got $7 million for one scene or a couple of lines at the end of one of these films.
But I don't know which one it is, because the next one's for me, Mission, Colon, Impossible, Hyphen, Rogue Nation, and Mission Impossible, Fallout, and Dead Reckoning, Part One. They all just sort of blur together.
I don't know which one is Rogue Nation versus Fallout. I'm not sure.
Well, don't they both have the same bad guy? Solomon, Solomon Lane?
Oh, wow. There's a title for you. They just...
One of them has Wolf Blitzer, the CNN guy. I don't know which one. Is that Fallout or Rogue Nation?
I don't know. One of them has the old Superman, Henry Cavill, cocking his biceps. I don't know.
Maybe that's Fallout. I don't know. And then we get Dead Reckoning, Part One, which is just a blur.
And this is what I talked about. You know, I mentioned Christopher McCrory. They all, to me, sort of feel of a piece.
They don't really stand out for me. They're not workmen-like. They're very well done.
But they just sort of all blur together, much like Christopher McCrory's, like, Jack Reacher movie, where he's sort of like, well, it's well-made, but it's just kind of a blur.
And that's why Mission, Colon, Impossible, Hyphen, The Final Reckoning was such a revelation. So surprising.
Just for coherence and completion's sake. Yes. And Rogue, no, not Rogue Nation, Ghost.
Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation.
The Ones with Solomon Lane, played by the great Sean Harris.
Fantastic actor.
Who's the Secretary's messenger?
Is that Alec Baldwin?
It's Alec Baldwin, yes.
Right. Do they have one in the most recent film or is it just a voice?
In which most recent film?
Prior Reckoning, Reckoning Appetizer.
This is a five-hour episode here. This is probably the most podcast-y of our shows we've ever done. This feels more like a modern podcast.
If you want our podcast to sound like a podcast, you come to the right place.
Maybe once in a blue moon, it actually sounds like a podcast, but we can still have an authentic conversation. Are you saying, of the previous seven, do you have a highlight?
I would say Mission Impossible 3 is probably, for me, that one does stand out because he does have a relationship. There is a sense of a life lived and a life that could be lost, and the notion of sacrifice really comes out.
And it also has Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Would that be an O? Does it reach the level of an O?
It's more than an A.
It's more than an A. Do you have a low light?
Low light is whatever Mission Impossible 2 is, which is a very difficult film. Again, tonally mashing John Woo's style with Robert Towne's script is a rough one.
So let's wrap this up as we move into a clip and then a spoiler fool or at least a spoiler permitted discussion of The Final Reckoning. This last one, I liked a lot and it had this sense of, I'm just going to call it like low lying thunder to it.
There was a heaviness, but it was an enjoyable heaviness and an unpredictability. Despite the fact that you always know some exceptions, but almost always know Ethan is going to survive.
There was actually a genuine sense of menace and threat and something important for the world, and has my favorite moment in any of the Mission Impossible films, possibly including the current one, and that is when Ethan chooses not to kill one of
the hench people who has the opportunity to kill. Copper Fasting, what we already know about him, which is that he's not cold blood. He's not a psychopath. He does what he believes needs to be done and nothing more.
So I was going into this film with reasonable expectations.
Yes.
You were going in with the expectations of an ah, anything else you want to say before our clip?
I'm with you on the last film is interesting, but it's for me overly long, overly stuffed. There just seems to be a production problem. Maybe they're just shooting during COVID where the shots don't match up.
So they're kind of haphazard in terms of the way that the film cuts together or the way that the camera what's called crossing the line where people's eye lines don't match. And so it feels kind of haphazard.
So I was expecting something similar along the lines for this, the new film. But again, the new film is totally different, which again, why it was so surprising to me. Let's get into this clip.
In this clip, we've got Tom Cruise is getting up to some hijinks. Let's listen in.
The CIA Black Fault breaking. Am I reading this correctly? The Kremlin bombing?
In fairness, the bomb was actually meant to kill him.
He gassed a security briefing.
That was just two months ago. This explains the handcuffs.
It's still not clear why he's here.
If we want to bring the world back from the brink, we have to deal with him.
Should he choose to accept?
Smart people on every side are close to panicking.
What exactly is your plan?
That is Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning. Jett, this film should have been titled Wile E. Coyote Hunts for the Red Abyss Pending Arrival.
And we may be a little bit of Lawrence of Arabia in 2001 into that mix as well. And that's a way of saying it's a barnstorming, not overstuffed, perfectly stuffed, big scale, rip roaring entertainment.
I had a Cheshire Cat grin on my face the whole way through. It has one of the most tense sequences in a film of this nature.
I guess you could call it the guy in a submarine trying to get something by himself while the submarine starts to sink again sequence. And I remember watching it about 30 minutes later. We were only 10 minutes into the film at that point.
And I thought, wow, yesterday I saw that submarine sequence and this film hasn't started yet. It's that long and it's not too long. I do have some questions about it, which I'm sure we'll get into.
But the last thing I'll say is one of the things that sets this film apart, this thunderous film. And I do think nearly 24 hours after seeing it, my body is kind of still vibrating from that thunder going through me.
One of the things that sets it apart is the craft with which it's made. What you've always referred to as the grammar of the film making, and that it's not just rush, rush, rush, rush, rush, set piece, set piece, set piece, set piece.
There's breathing space in this film. There's character arcs. There are times when it feels like Raiders of the Lost Ark, actually, and it's explicitly referencing Raiders of the Lost Ark.
It's a movie lovers film. It's referencing films all over the place. But most importantly, it says something about the world and perhaps something that could be heard by the whole world of people who go to see this film.
It conceives of the thing worth saving is not nations, it's not tribes. It's all of humanity and that all of humanity has a role to play. At least in terms of changing our thinking about what should be preserved.
I've never quite seen Tom Cruise as a person who had something to say to the world. Obviously, he's the most famous and most popular movie star. And as people say, the last movie star.
But he actually came away from this film with a respect for what he seems to be thinking about, that he wants to convey. He's often thought of someone who doesn't take a political position on things. He doesn't speak out about politics.
I actually think that this film gives the lie to that. This film is an intelligent film for our times that has something to say, that could unite some people across the very lines of difference that feel like chasms in our society.
That's my opening thoughts. I got some questions. What about you, dear Jett?
So you've got some questions?
I got some questions.
And by the way, I agree with everything you just said.
The very first scene of the film, the very first scene, Ethan is watching a VHS cassette, which is being used because they've had to go analog because the entity who was set up at the previous film only can only know digital things.
And so they're trying to conceal things from the entity. He's got to, he's playing a VHS cassette. It's President Angela Bassett who's saying, Ethan, Ethan, Ethan, we think you're great.
I know you think you're doing the right thing. We really need you to come in. We don't know where you are.
Will you please come in and see us? And then, so, so first of all, I have a question, which is if they don't know where he is, how did they get in video cassette?
And then after that, he walks right out into, I think it's Trafalgar Square, because he's, I think he's living in one of those secret, you know, there's the secret mall apartment, I guess.
There's a secret national portrait gallery apartment that he's living in. And he walks right out into a mass gathering of, of people who get referred to later as people who spend too much time on the internet.
He walks, he walks onto the set of Children of Men.
Children of Men, but people, they don't know where he is. They don't know where he is. They got him.
So that, that's, let's just say the verisimilitude, the plausibility of the film isn't the thing that matters in terms of the practical aspects of the plot.
The plausibility of the meaning of the film, that there are people who need to do things outside the accepted norms for the sake of the common good. I bought that part.
But that, that did feel a bit strange to start the film by saying, we don't know where you are, but we're telling you this on a video cassette that we've somehow managed to get courier to you.
Maybe you're not familiar with the original Mission Impossible TV show. In the Mission Impossible TV show, the recordings were not given to Jim Phelps. He was always going somewhere.
So he'd go see a guy fishing, you know, at an old pier. And the guy, they'd say, oh, the weather's nice today. Yes, especially in, you know, Provence.
And then he would get the tape, right? So the assumption is that he went somewhere where he knew there'd be a dead drop where he could get the tape. And then he wanders into a combination of Children of Men.
And amazingly, talk about how this film loves movies. Apparently also members from the Underground Society of Escape from Planet of the Apes, Children of the Atom. I was surprised by that.
This film's got everything. Everything Gareth said is totally correct.
This film is a surprise, not just because it's so tonally different, not just because it's cut differently, because it's not super fast paced like the other Mission Impossible films in the last few by Christopher Quarry.
Instead, it's slow with lots of exposition and then long set pieces. But it's a movie that loves movies. I mean, there's one whole section of the motion picture that's fail safe.
That's the black and white Henry Fonda film.
And the moral advance on failsafe in that scene when the president is advised by Sherlock Holmes' brother, Moriarty, to, or at least he says, I find this idea compelling, but the way to prevent the destruction of the human race is for her to switch
off the power to America's nuclear arsenal is a radically third way post-Gerardian idea that the only legitimate scapegoating is when I choose to allow myself to be scapegoated because there's no other way to prevent further harm coming to people.
Well, absolutely, and you know, it's a film that's, there was literally, it could have almost been the end shot.
I thought, oh, is this going to be the end shot?
That's right out of that other great pan to piece, the film, Stuart Gordon's Robot Jocks, which, which Robot Jocks has a really surprising message at the end in which the, you know, the hero and the villain decide not to, not to kill each other, they
can live. And there's a shot right out of Robot Jocks with, with Ethan Hunt and, and one, the nemesis from the, the picture.
Maybe just say one more thing about that, which is that like what it's advocating is that one way, and perhaps the best way, perhaps the most powerful and effective way to move beyond enmity is for the more powerful party to decommission the threat,
to make a go first strike agreement. Somebody always has to go first. And there's also a little gray stone in this and that.
Nick Offerman, who plays, I don't know if he's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs or Senior Military Brass, who doesn't like what this liberal president is going to do.
And yet he's still loyal to her out of a sense of integrity, out of a sense of integrity. He actually saves her life.
He's the Buck Turgeson from Dr. Strangelove, as the George C. Scott character.
But you know, it's something this film does in the way that it retcons the other ones.
It almost, to me, and it fits in thematically where we've been talking here, the film almost feels like an act of atonement, specifically in a couple of different ways.
One, it's almost atoning for what they did to Jim Phelps in the first film, because in this film reveals that he has a son who then makes peace with, Shade the Great, Shae Wiggo, makes peace with Tom Cruise's character.
But specifically, and what I thought was going to be a throwaway gag, this film atones for the treatment of a character, I don't know if he even has a line in the first film, but he's played as a comic stooge, and he reappears in this motion picture.
I didn't know that because I don't follow the trades.
He reappears in this movie, Dear Listener, and I thought, oh, that's funny, it's a throwaway gag, they're bringing him back because we find the joke is that he's been, basically, it's one of those, the old joke of him being sent to Siberia.
For 30 years. He's been exiled for 30 years because of what Tom Cruise did to him, it's a joke.
But instead of being a throwaway gag, he's him and his indigenous wife, doesn't speak English in the movie, is integral in a huge part of the last, what, hour, hour and a half. It's amazing.
We would all have been nuclearly vaporized if it had not been for William Donlo, played by Ralph Saxon, who actually, to be honest, he has not been in too many films in the last, I looked at his filmography yesterday.
I really don't think that I've seen him in any film since the department of Mission Impossible. And it's almost, it's not just atonement for what in the fictional world, the CIA did to his character.
It's kind of an atonement for what happened to his career. To his character, Donal and his wife, Tapisa, part of whose function in the film is to up the ante, to heighten the stakes around what could potentially be lost here.
And also name the existence. This may sound ridiculous to some people, but name the existence of the sacred and of something. The entity is like the, let's call it the shadow sacred, the demonic.
And Tapisa, when she says, I'll see you again, and in the film, you don't know, she's speaking of the afterlife here because she may die or he may die before they get the chance to see each other again.
And as played by Lucy Tula-Garjuk, and I'm hoping I'm pronouncing her name correctly. It's not a throwaway line. She's not a throwaway character.
No, it's almost like it's John Ford's The Searchers are Good.
But ethical.
But ethical.
Yeah. You know, there's like a comic relief indigenous person, The Searchers, which is like, oh man. But this one, it's good.
Wonderful.
And there's something else this film does.
And so if it was just what Gareth and I were talking about, again, that sense of atonement, that sense that there's a different way of living your life, there's a different way for people that have power to live their life and to exist with others,
then it would be great. But it does something else, Gareth, dear listeners, and that is in the way that it covers, encompasses and comments on the history of the Internet.
Because the first film came out in 1996, and it's one of those films, we know films from that era like The Net, you know, Sandra Bullock.
So when someone sends an email, you have an animation of an envelope flying, and it takes a while to get that email.
And it's exciting because of the Internet, we can communicate with others, and now we're in a totally different world, and we're in a world where we're thinking maybe the Internet is a bad idea.
So it makes all the films of a piece, so in this film, basically, the villain is the Internet, it is deep fakes, it is AI.
And by having real world stunts in this film and in others, it's proposing an alternate way to fake read, which is saying, let's have some truth here.
So it actually makes thematic sense that Tom Cruise in this film is insanely, clearly strapping himself to a real biplane and flying around for extended periods of time. Clearly, that's very dangerous, but it absolutely works.
So having that thematic resonance just elevates this entire endeavor, if that makes sense. And we haven't really even talked in detail about the middle, central action piece, which, how long does it go on without dialogue?
I'm still watching it.
Is it 15 minutes?
The film started yesterday afternoon at 3 o'clock. It's 1:20 p.m. as we're recording.
I'm still in the middle of that sequence.
It's an astonishing sequence that harkens back to all the real life dive work they did in The Abyss. It harkens back to 2001. It's a kind of a fusion of 2001 and The Abyss and it really works.
It's frightening.
It's incredibly suspenseful.
Could you call it delightfully frightening, deliciously frightening?
Because I wasn't scared the way I am in a horror movie, but I was definitely tense and it's extraordinarily well crafted.
It's so well done. Obviously, it must have built a huge set that's on a centrifuge that could pump full of water and rotate it like the centrifuge in 2001 or Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars. The fact is, we never cut away.
This whole central sequence with no dialogue, which goes on and on and on, we don't cut away to other folks or people doing other bits of business. You're just trapped underwater with Tom Cruise. Now, they do do one thing.
Sometimes you watch a movie, dear listeners, and you can tell the filmmakers may be in test screenings, think, oh, the audience doesn't know what's going on. And so they'll double line.
There's an infamous example in the original version of The Untouchables in which Kevin Costner takes a gun from a shot security guard. And they probably thought, well, it's not clear he's getting the gun or is he stealing the gun?
And so they're dubbed in as a security guard going, take it. And it's really badly done. And now when you watch, by the way, they've scrubbed that.
They've taken that out, which is really sad.
And in this central action set piece, which is designed to be silent, again, you just hear the breathing like you hear the breathing of the astronauts in 2001, which it's referencing, they did have one line, which is not necessary of Ethan Hunt
going, Torpedo tube. Yes, that's right. And it's like, you don't need that. They could cut it out.
It's just too bad.
Well, I don't know. This is one of those ones. I don't know, Jett.
Serious point, serious point. And dear listener, maybe if you've listened to the show for a while, you might have a thought on this too. I'd love to hear it.
I genuinely think, Jett, you see things that most people don't. You think things in a more complex way that many people don't, particularly about Sidney Lumet.
That's very kind of you.
I didn't say it was a good thing. I don't know. No, it is a good thing.
But you've often predicted the endings of films. And maybe it's because you're already thinking about this before you go in. I definitely thought when he said Torpedo Tube, I had a similar thought to you on, they didn't need to say that.
But actually, they kind of did. They kind of did. I'm not sure I would have known what that was, you know.
Well, obviously, that's something, you get feedback.
You do test screenings, you show it to your friends and your colleagues and people thought. I thought it was clear enough because you have an actual lodged torpedo in the tube.
And he probably wouldn't have said it out loud.
You know, because if they hadn't had that line, then after this, if they hadn't dubbed that in or put that in, then the first words after no words being spoken for, let's say, 15 minutes would have been the words, it's okay.
And that would have, yeah, come on, maybe, who knows?
You're ruining the film. I don't like the film anymore. So, I got a question for you.
Yeah, I'm here to answer all questions.
Okay, Lawrence of Arabia in 2001.
What made you think about Lawrence of Arabia in 2001?
Here's the thing. The last few films kind of blurred me because they're all kind of cutty. This film is very different in its pacing.
It takes long periods of times. It has confidence, torpedo tube aside, it has confidence in itself, in the way that Lawrence of Arabia does. Lawrence of Arabia is like, we're going to have these shots of the desert.
It's going to take a while. It's going to take a while for Muammar Sharif to come out of the mirage in the desert.
When you have that central sequence of Ethan Hunt in the submarine, it has such confidence to not cut away, to just have you there with no dialogue, that it reminded me of Lawrence of Arabia.
It reminded me of Lawrence of Arabia in that moment and also in other parts of the film in that it's not cutting. Now, there are a couple of sections of the film.
You do also literally refer to the key line in Lawrence of Arabia.
Yes, and they refer throughout to a key line from Lawrence of Arabia that posits that Ethan Hunt could almost become sort of a megalomaniac figure, that because he has such power and such skills, that he is otherworldly like Peter O'Toole is in
Lawrence of Arabia. But again, he makes the right choice. It's non-violent choices at the end of the picture.
And the echoes of 2001? Well, I mean, I think when he's kind of doing the stuff in the submarine, kind of taking the, like the little plastic thingy, what's it called? The pod, the pod, the pod cova, the pod bay door.
Again, it fuses, yes, in 2001, we have long stretches of, with no dialogue, of the astronauts going out into space.
And watching this film, you ask yourself, wait, have we ever seen this guy? You know, has he been, done an outer space movie? I mean, he did Oblivion.
And so it is a very 2001-esque sequence. Again, combining 2001 with one of, you know, James Cameron's like an acolyte or a huge admirer of Stanley Kubrick's. You're fusing Cameron's The Abyss with 2001.
Well, and, you know, I was thinking about Cameron a lot.
One of the things you said about Avatar when we, when we first saw it was that it's like, it's, it's got this universal appeal and there are, I mean, I will see this film again. I'm sure there's a lot of things I missed in it.
I want to name that it's a queer friendly film as well.
There's at least two characters who are evoking queer culture, both in the sense of what gets called butch lesbian culture in the form of one of the naval, one of the, one of the US American sailors, who I think saves his life at one point.
And this absolutely fascinating character, what's, what's she called? Do you remember, Jett, the, the previous henchwoman who's now on the team, Pom Plamenchev, whose character is called Paris. I don't know.
Again, I'm having a lot of, a lot of uncertainty about whether or not I'm pronouncing people's names correctly.
But it's Jett Loe.
She's fascinating because as I've already said, she joins the team because he doesn't kill her when he has the chance to do so.
Yes.
And frankly, that is how people have made peace with each other. A lot of times is when they recognize someone has the chance to harm them and may even be justified in some respects in doing so and chooses not to do that.
That's what Ethan is embodying at the highest level. It is at times a bit ridiculous. The 15th time somebody says to him, only you can save us.
There's bits where it's like, no, no, wait, I think, excuse me to the listeners, there is a character actually says to Ethan Hunt, everything you've done before has led up to this.
But there's a couple of levels on which I think that actually does work and is useful.
One is, at some level, only Tom Cruise can save the theatrical experience of cinema. He's obviously deeply, deeply, deeply committed to that.
And at a more important level, there's another person who says only he can save us, who's present in the world today. And the way he does that is by dividing and attempting to conquer.
And the way Ethan does it is by absorbing the world's enmity into himself. And at the very end of the film is the only person trustable with the power to destroy the world, because he's proven himself trustable.
He's the antithesis to the Gabriel character. It's interesting, Gabriel is the name of an angel. And in this film, he is a bleak, demonic angel who wants to take that power for himself to destroy.
And Ethan shows you actually, the opposite of tyrannical leadership is not no leadership. It's sacrificial servant leadership. Now, whether or not Tom Cruise himself thinks he's the Messiah, I don't think that's all that relevant.
And I suspect he does. Now, it's clear he's having a lot of work.
I was getting concerned. I was getting concerned. It was getting a little Jesusy.
That the film was getting a little Jesusy.
But I was worried.
It understands something about a more complex theological exploration.
Not that Jesus died for our sins, but that Jesus lived to show us how to live. The two things aren't opposed to each other. But in a lot of Christian circles, it's death of Jesus that matters.
And the teachings and the life of Jesus are like at best this kind of optional extra, as opposed to the incarnation really matters here.
And if there's, you know, maybe you're a Simon Pegg, maybe you're a Haley Atwell, maybe you're a Luther Ving Rhames, maybe you're an Ethan. Just don't get a Messiah complex about it. Gabriel's the one with the Messiah complex.
Ethan understands that the bishop is about service.
And you know, and that's why I think it's so great that the last shot of the film is Ethan, he's not held up. He doesn't receive an award like the end of Star Wars. Instead, he melds off into a crowd in London.
Having helped achieve world peace and told the story about reverse scapegoating.
Well, and it's interesting because Tom Cruise, you talk about being the last movie star.
And so there's maybe like, I was watching going, imagine this is his last film. In the last film, then he becomes the ordinary common man who melds into the street.
I'm sure that's what's going to happen. He's actually, he's being lined up to take a supporting role in Mike Lee's next film. And I think thereafter, he's going to go and learn woodworking and stay in his cabin.
You're making a little wee joke there, but that would be great if he was in the new Mike Lee picture.
That would be wonderful.
I know you don't follow film news. You know what he just shot?
No.
You want to know? Is it a spoiler for you?
No, don't tell me. I don't want to know. I want to be surprised.
He's made an interesting choice.
He's made an interesting choice.
One thing about the Internet is like, just know you can't get lost.
So you never discover anything truly new.
It's all just, it's all regurgitated. But listen, one more thing I want to talk about. I'm assuming in your version of the film was the same as mine, in that Tom Cruise, as Tom Cruise, introduces the film.
Yes.
And he doesn't say, hi, I'm Tom Cruise, which is...
It doesn't need to. Yeah, he's not like he goes grocery shopping at the Ralphs and has to say, you know, they want to check his ID to make sure that he's, that he isn't.
But here's the thing, and this also fits in thematically with this idea of the real versus the fake. We think about streaming, we think about how the internet has collapsed communal experiences. He opens the movie as Tom Cruise.
It's part of the same digital files. It's not tacked on, it's in the file. And he's looking at you, the audience, saying, thank you for being here.
Thank you for coming to the movie theater. This is how the movie should be seen and our movie theater is awesome. Now it's unfortunate that he's reading off a prompter.
I kind of feel that if he had memorized that, he could have done it from the heart. I don't know why they had him read. I guess he's very busy.
But that itself also is an interesting bookend for this film. So in the end of the film, he, the beginning of the picture, he doesn't even need to introduce himself because he's so world famous. He says, thank you for being here.
Tom Cruise speaks to you. And then at the end, he melds off into nothing as spoilers for the wonderful Richard Red Matheson pen to picture from the 1950s, the incredible Shrinking Man.
It's also parallel to the end of Wonder Woman 1984. It's pretty much an identical.
The man is shrinking, melts off into infinity. And there's Tom Cruise melting off to be of the common man. Boy, the film's getting better and better just talking about it.
I am looking forward to seeing it again.
And I do want to reiterate, dear, dear listener, if your body is the kind of body or your nervous system, the kind of nervous system that vibrates in unpleasant ways, when you're experiencing thunderous action sequences, be advised that you may
experience some disproportionate vibration. But it's worth it. Are you, Jett, envisaging any point in the future that you might blend and meld off into the distance among the common person in your life?
If I do, you'll be the first to know as well as the listeners. I'll have some sort of like, I don't know.
Where I can get a dead drop of a VHS cassette.
Well, like, you know, if something happens to me, my lawyers will send something to the New York Times. So if something happens to me, there'll be one more podcast file, which will be triggered and sent off to all the listeners.
Well, Gareth, I've enjoyed talking with you about Mission colon Impossible hyphen The Final Reckoning. It's interesting they went with Final rather than Dead Reckoning part two.
Well, you know why.
Dead Reckoning didn't do well.
Dead Reckoning flopped, and they wanted to, they didn't want to heighten the audience's knowledge that this was effectively a sequel. And you can go and see this without having seen any of the other ones and thoroughly enjoy it.
I'd love talking with you about it as well, Jett. I've learned from you, as I always do.
And if I was the son of a corrupt agent who 30 years ago you had killed, I would want to reconcile with you as well, because I see you as an advocate of reverse scapegoating and, indeed, world peace.
You know, I try, but so far I don't seem to be doing too well. And keep in mind, but wait, hold on, keep in mind, I mean, you know, there are better roles possible.
Mission, Impossible, Hight from the Final Reckoning does take place in the universe in which apparently Kamala Harris won.
That's true. And also, maybe last thing, what's the line? It says something toward the end, like, your goodness is not defined by what you think, by what you do, but by what you do for others.
It's the Quacho speech from Total Recall.
Folks, don't forget, you can always contact us, info at thefilmtalk.org, we're on Patreon, patreon.com/thefilmtalk, if you enjoy listening to us. Discover what the world's really about and how we can help things, make things better through movies.
Thanks for listening to this conversation, dear listener. You can probably find Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning at a local movie theater somewhere, maybe even eons into the future, when hopefully the entity has not taken over the world.
Thanks for listening to this conversation. You know where you can find Mission Impossible. I've been Gareth Higgins.
I've been Jett Loe.
I'm going to go head off to the Torpedo Tube.
Well, hopefully, you will emerge from that tube and we'll keep talking.
Next time.