This article appeared in the May 28, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (Christopher McQuarrie, 2025)

“We are now in the reality of the Entity.” This is the warning intoned several times in the latest installment of the Mission: Impossible series, The Final Reckoning. A sinister A.I. program, the Entity has taken over global cyber-networks (including nuclear-weapon launch systems) and threatens the existence of the entire human race. The threat echoes the rhetoric of contemporary pundits and prophets decrying the extinction of human creativity as Artificial Intelligence seems poised to generate everything from student term papers to movie scripts—and perhaps even nuclear codes. In contrast, The Final Reckoning celebrates the tenacity and power of the human body struggling against technology.

In the first entry in the film franchise, Mission: Impossible (1996), Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt hung upside-down from an air duct in a maximum-security vault while attempting to transfer data onto a floppy disk. He had to maintain absolute silence, defy gravity, and control bodily functions (sneezes and drops of sweat could imperil his mission). The sequence was compelling, even enthralling. But another death-defying episode later in the film, in which Cruise clings to a train speeding into a tunnel, leading the helicopter pursuing him to its fiery destruction, appeared to me rather ho-hum. CGI was still in early development then, and the exploding helicopter, with its rotary blade poised at Ethan’s throat, delivered just another image—and a none-too-convincing one. The disk-heist sequence, on the other hand, vividly recalled experiences of physical effort and concentration that viewers could identify with, even if they had never hung upside-down in a vault and risked fatal discovery.

The set pieces of The Final Reckoning –. Cruise leaps from one vintage biplane to another, the high speed and altitude notwithstanding; he grasps the struts and clambers over a wing to mount the cockpit, confront the villain, and gain control of the doodad that will destroy the Entity. Enormous muscular strength and endurance become visible in the actor’s flesh, his face and hair pulled taut by speed and air pressure. The recent Mission: Impossible films root dramatic action in a physicality that makes the viewer’s muscles tighten or their skin creep. The seemingly endless image-manipulation that CGI makes possible gives way in these images to a sensation of bodily reality.

From its beginnings, cinema sought an affinity with the movement of the human body. After all, motion-picture technology was invented by Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge at the end of the 19th century to record the physiology of humans and animals in motion. The movies that followed remained true to their origin in the capture of physical action. The acrobatic stunts of Douglas Fairbanks and the daredevil comedy of Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton in silent cinema merged the new technology with physical dexterity. The new art of cinema didn’t simply tell stories, but made the viewer feel something deep in their gut and muscle fiber. Actor-producer Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (who has helmed the last four Mission: Impossible entries, starting with 2015’s Rogue Nation) know they belong to this tradition. Cruise persuaded McQuarrie to let him actually walk onto the airplane wing in flight, “to feel for himself what that energy is like.” That the star dared to do it recalls British painter J.M.W. Turner’s determination to lean out of a speeding train and face the new experience of “Rain, Steam, and Speed” head-on, before he embarked on his revolutionary 1844 painting of that name.

Cruise and McQuarrie often repeat Hollywood’s mantra that everything in a film should contribute to the “story.” But what role does story play in the action genre? The serial films that emerged in the 1910s with their famous cliff-hangers provided an enduring model. Pearl White, star of The Perils of Pauline (1914), described the serial’s storyline as a pursuit of what she called “the weenie,” an object that motivates the action; Alfred Hitchcock called the same thing a “MacGuffin.” Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’s “weenie” may be a bit complex (a bejeweled pair of keys which must be fitted together and inserted into a device known as the Podkova in order to create the “poison pill” that destroys the Entity), but it adds up to the same thing. Both Hitchcock and Pearl White understood that the weenie exists merely to trigger the action; it is of no interest in itself. Of course, impelling the action is crucially important—but mainly because it sets in motion a series of spectacular events that I have termed “attractions.”

Attractions are the moments of visual intensity that directly impact the audience—the “wow” moments. At the beginning of film history, magician-filmmaker Georges Méliès dazzled spectators with trick films whose stories merely provided a pretext—the clothesline on which he hung various attractions: elaborate sets, costumes, and magical appearances, disappearances, and transformations. Of course, you need the clothesline or everything falls apart. But it remains, as Méliès said, a pretext.

I am not claiming that stories are unimportant, but simply that they do not necessarily form—as many critics and scriptwriters assume—the center of a film, especially in the action genre. Hitchcock became such an influential director because he forged an intense integration of attractions and narrative. Following leads provided by Louis Feuillade, D.W. Griffith, and Fritz Lang, Hitchcock created a model that many have tried—and by and large failed—to follow. A sequence in McQuarrie’s Rogue Nation did Hitchcock one better, staging an assassination attempt during a performance of Puccini’s Turandot, undoubtedly inspired by similar scenes in Hitchcock’s two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and 1956) and perhaps Griffith’s portrayal of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in The Birth of a Nation (1915). The suspenseful intercutting during the aria “Nessun dorma” intricately interweaves a soaring tenor voice with multiple shooters taking aim, complex theatrical technology in operation, and video surveillance tracking it all. The Final Reckoning, alas, never pulls off that sort of mastery. But to its credit, it never loses a sense of ordinary physical and material constraints even in the midst of scenes of elaborate special effects. As Ethan squeezes through one of the submarine’s torpedo tubes, he finds the gear that protects him from the cold and pressure of the ocean deep doesn’t fit and he has to strip it off. Advanced technology gets abandoned as our hero confronts the physical difficulties that a plumber might encounter crawling under a kitchen sink.

In The Final Reckoning’s opening, an off-screen voice, presumably emanating from the Entity, delivers lines that McQuarrie lifted from a famous theological concept describing God as a being whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere. (McQuarrie makes canny use of cultural references, as in his appropriation of Baudelaire’s claim that the Devil’s best trick is to convince us that he doesn’t exist in his script for 1995’s The Usual Suspects.) However, here he alters the quote by concluding, “There is no center.” This may be a perfect description of the expanding reality of A.I., as well the current state of things, as any concept of Truth seems to be permanently uncentered. Can this reality produce stories we can still feel? Visualizing bodily endurance in impossible situations may restore a sense of physicality in an era of virtuality.

Tom Gunning is a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago’s Department of Cinema and Media Studies. His book The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde was recently published by the University of Chicago Press.