Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One - Cheap Thoughts

What does Ethan Hunt believe in? He’s been a secret agent for over 25 years, we know very little of his backstory or motivations or morals. What drives him to be who he is? I imagine these are all questions Tom Cruise has asked while making this picture. He dedicates so much of himself to the craft and over the past 20 years has built up his own team of talented and trustworthy people to help make the best films possible, he is the best and he works with the best to make the best. Yet there has been such a focus on the technical side of filmmaking that here in the winter years of this franchise Cruise & Co have begun to look inwards. They know how to construct the perfect spy movie featuring Ethan Hunt, but why does Hunt do it apart from simply because he is the protagonist of a spy movie?

Ethan has people he cares about but almost seems like he doesn’t want to, because in his field to love people is to eventually lose people. The first Mission: Impossible sees Hunt lose his entire team and for a while there he was on a rotating cast of squadmates. He tried to have a normal life in Mission: Impossible III and all that did was put an ordinary person in danger. It wasn’t until Rogue Nation that he realised though he closed himself off to others, they didn’t do the same. His teammates trust him and care for him and to block them off only puts them in more danger. Ethan caring for people drives him, it makes him work harder and makes him do insane things in the name of protecting others.

“I can promise you, that your life will always matter to me more than my own”.

Ethan doesn’t view the world as binary, as one way or another, save this person or that person. He always finds a way, he does the unexpected, when told to go left or right, he goes straight ahead. So what could his ultimate enemy be? An algorithm that predicts what you’re going to do based on what’s been done before, and a person who knows the only way to beat Ethan is to hurt those closest to him. He’s pushed into a corner and is left swinging wildly hoping for an escape, which is not uncommon of Hunt to go in with no plan, just hope, but when someone is able to predict even the unpredictable what do you do then?

Mission: Impossible II had a villain who was able to predict every move Ethan would make, no matter how absurd, and that always sat wrong with me. No man should be able to predict Ethan’s next move. But an all-knowing pseudo-god artificial intelligence? That could crack it. The biggest threat to the future of filmmaking is also the biggest threat in the text of the film. They’re left without relying on technology for cheats and shortcuts, they only have each other and their natural talent, yet Cruise/Hunt will never ask others to risk more for the job than he will himself.

-Danny