Tom Cruise’s new film, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, sees the world’s most bankable film star take on his most topical villain yet: AI.
In the movie’s opening scene, a Russian nuclear submarine meets a grim fate – another incidence of uncanny timing, given the Titan submersible tragedy last month (meanwhile, the name of the vessel is Sebastopol).
The orchestrator of the film’s explosion turns out to be an experimental artificial intelligence program on board, which has become sentient and, in true Mission: Impossible tradition, “gone rogue”. Military powers around the world quickly realise that this all-powerful AI, known as “the Entity”, can break into any secure facility, fake or steal human identities, manipulate digital reality and generally cause chaos without leaving a trace – it’s the perfect spy. It is also far smarter than humans; our weapons are useless against it.
The film, the seventh in Cruise’s longest lasting franchise, has been in production for about four years, making the prescience of its plot as much luck as intention. Blockbuster movies have tackled malevolent AI many times before, from the Terminator franchise to Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, and had Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One been released as intended in July 2021 (before Covid derailed production), it would have looked like any other speculative thriller. Now it feels like a credible scenario.
In March this year, leading AI researchers were so stunned by recent advances in the field, such as OpenAI’s chatbot GPT-4, they wrote an open letter stating that “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity”. They called for a pause in AI development, asking, “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?” Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning asks the same question.
However, for all the film’s tech-paranoia timeliness, a computer program does not make for a very cinematic adversary. Dead Reckoning compensates with thrilling and defiantly old-school human action: car chases, train crashes, leaps off cliffs and plenty of hand-to-hand combat, much of which Cruise, 61, does himself at considerable physical risk.
The movie’s zeitgeist-capturing relevance stands in contrast to Cruise’s last blockbuster, Top Gun: Maverick, which scrupulously avoided any references to real-world geopolitics, sending its fighter pilots on a mission to bomb an unspecified enemy at an unnamed location. That didn’t seem to matter to the audience; Maverick was the highest-grossing movie of 2022, taking nearly $1.5bn worldwide. After the pummelling the industry took during the pandemic, Cruise was credited with singlehandedly rescuing cinema. At an Oscars luncheon earlier this year, Steven Spielberg told the actor, “You saved Hollywood’s ass and you might have saved theatrical distribution.”
However, Top Gun: Maverick delivered a similar message to Dead Reckoning: skilled human fighter pilots such as Cruise’s character were soon to be superseded by hi-tech computer-controlled planes or drones. But of course, he proves the theory wrong; in both films, the unpredictable human element saves the day – and, it would appear, the movie industry itself.
Can Cruise do it again with Mission: Impossible? The year so far has been marked by high-profile disappointments such as Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Little Mermaid, The Flash. Even Fast X, the latest in the Fast and Furious series, has underperformed by the standards of its predecessors – Furious 7 made $1.5bn; Fast X $700m. Analysts are predicting Dead Reckoning will have the highest opening of the Mission: Impossible franchise.
But if Cruise is Hollywood’s man of the moment, he is at least spreading the love. Mission: Impossible faces two big rivals at this summer’s box office: Christopher Nolan’s atomic bomb drama Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s pinktastic reinvention of Barbie, both of which are set for release on 21 July in the UK and US. Last week, Cruise tweeted photos of himself and Mission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie proudly brandishing cinema tickets to Indiana Jones, Oppenheimer and Barbie. “This summer is full of amazing movies to see in theatres,” he wrote. “I love a double feature, and it doesn’t get more explosive (or more pink) than one with Oppenheimer and Barbie.”
Cruise intends to see Oppenheimer on Friday and Barbie on Saturday, he told reporters in Australia while promoting Mission: Impossible. No doubt he is looking to surf the “Barbenheimer” wave that threatens to steal Mission: Impossible’s thunder – but it’s also clear evidence that Cruise sees saving cinema as a joint mission.
