Coming at you with a Substack on my vacation!
That vacation is what prompted this post, one in which my family decided to go on a Tom-Cruise marathon for God knows what reason. Maybe it was the subliminal messaging in the Mission: Impossible 7 advertising.
Speaking of that new release, I haven’t yet seen it and will make some fun predictions later in this post about what it’s about, based on what Mr. Cruise has been doing lately.
What he has been doing lately is pretty well, one of the top movies of last year and possibly one of them this year, with Mission: Impossible, Dead Reckoning, Part One. He’s doing so well he can pull off a long pedantic title like that.
With Hollywood actors going on strike yet having as little power as ever, I note that Cruise is about the closest thing we have to Charlie Chaplin these days. I don’t invoke Chaplin seriously: he was much more dominant culturally, probably by orders of magnitude, than Cruise is today.
But what Cruise has been doing in his past few movies is remarkable: 1) mostly real stunts and action scenes that would make the best silent-movie actors like Chaplin applaud, and 2) acting and producing in top box-office films. I also have no doubt that his producing role means he has general say over every aspect of a movie production.
Which is what Chaplin was up to at his peak.
My family decided to watch the last three Mission: Impossible movies, which I think are cinematically the best three. Then they watched Top Gun: Maverick. We did this over a four-day period.
None of my kids had seen any of these. I am not sure they knew who Cruise was before this marathon.
(Quick Story: we were watching an NBA playoff game in April, and it was the Lakers vs. the Nuggets, in LA. The TV broadcast highlighted all of the “stars” at the game. They included Andy Garcia, Eddie Murphy, Denzel Washington, and “Jack,” who looked as if he’d just left the hospital after a six-month stay and then they ran him through a carwash. Anyway, none of my kids had heard of any of these people. I told them Eddie Murphy is the Donkey in Shrek, and they said “oh.” A sure sign that Hollywood is near-dead is that the most famous people are all over 40 and that nobody under 20 has heard of any of them.)
So the Mission: Impossible movies — these are designed for anybody in any walk of life to watch and enjoy, as popcorn chompers that sell tickets. You can use your entire brain to try to figure out the plot entanglements, or you can be as dumb as you want to be while drooling at the screen. No matter what, they will do something to you.
And that’s partly because Cruise is willing to jump out of planes, jump off buildings, jump across buildings, jump out of helicopters, and jump off generally anything you can give him to jump off or onto or through. And as most of you know, it’s not even jumping that’s his specialty. It’s sprinting.
At 60, Cruise sprints fast. In cinema, he’d beat Usain Bolt, which is true movie magic.
Surprising to me, never having thought about these things, is the overlap between the last Top Gun and the last three Mission Impossibles, which I assume Cruise had a heavy hand in creating.
What he is doing is a formula that will probably be repeated in a hundred years, in whatever form of mass entertainment they have then.
Ingredient #1 — Have the hero be a solitary warrior aided by a ragtag team
This is the classic individual-group dynamic, where you can’t have one without the other, that’s basic to nearly anything you’ve ever seen.
The key is that Cruise movies are always crystal clear about Cruise being The Man and everybody else being subservient to him. There is no scene in which this isn’t the case. Most scenes are designed to reinforce this fact explicitly.
And in this way, Cruise took that from probably the most famous movie star ever, John Wayne.
However, Cruise movies do undercut the main character sometimes, as a feint to acknowledge feminism, MeToo, or whatever movement might notice that his movies are ultra-patriarchal. They only do this briefly but obviously.
Don’t be fooled though: Cruise is always The Man and the Alpha. For this reason, I read his movies as pretty conservative overall. He puts himself next to a sleek British woman (Rebecca Ferguson), an old overweight black guy (Ving Rhames), and a funny weaker British guy (Simon Pegg).
Ingredient #2 — The hero’s mission is always to be threatened by his bosses
It’s almost a joke that this happens every single time in the Mission: Impossible movies.
Without fail, Cruise’s agency – I mean his character Ethan Hunt’s agency – the IMF, is threatened to be shut down by the CIA, the US government, or some more powerful element like that.
At least two scenes per movie are dedicated to the threat of the IMF being shut down, meaning The Man and his ragtag team, which we see as ultra-effective at stopping bad guys, will be unjustly ended.
This is a classic dramatic move that syncs well with the greatest Machiavellian intrigues. Just as Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is threatened externally by rogue villains who threaten to blow up the world, he is threatened internally by his own people.
That dual external-internal threat doesn’t just double the tension, it exponentially increases it.
Hunt becomes a rebel figure, a nobody’s man, just as he is The Man. His own government despises him as much as the villains.
That means the completion of his mission shows up the powers that be just as much as it saves the world.
Which means, in the end, he’s even more of The Man than he would be just by defeating the big bad boss villain.
Ingredient #3 – The stakes are the highest they possibly can be.
For Cruise, that means the threat of nuclear war.
His Hunt character has to stop nuclear launch codes from being sold, and in the last movie, nuclear weapons from being fired. Mission: Impossible is nothing without the nuclear threat.
No surprise, then, that Top Gun: Maverick featured the nuclear threat. The nameless bad guys in that one were going to build a uranium-enrichment facility. And they weren’t doing that just to make a bunch of glowing rocks. Maverick has to re-create the Star Wars Death-Star run to stave off bad guys making nukes; he risks his life to save the world from the nuke threat.
Included in this, by the way, is the oldest action-movie cliché in the books: the countdown clock. Cruise absolutely loves this.
He loves it so much that in Mission: Impossible 6, the countdown clock was 15 minutes long. 15 minutes!
In Top Gun, he varied this by having a “clock” that counted up: the Mach-speed counter at the beginning of the movie. That one had to go up to 10, and it did, and then it went beyond.
Ingredient #4 – The Bad Guys are Generic Evil Dudes with no political or national affiliation at all
Cruise has no politics in his movies except that which is positive. In the end of everything, US government agencies are relative good guys, including the CIA. British MI-6 intelligence is a little more dubious, yet they have the cutest character and they are generally harmless.
The IMF in Mission: Impossible is always super-effective. If the US Post Office ran as efficiently as them, there would be no UPS. Hunt’s team does everything so effectively that no terrorist has a prayer, ultimately.
But the terrorists are just that. None of them are affiliated with any government in the world. They are all “rogue,” a word sometimes used in these movies. In Mission: Impossible, there’s the Syndicate, and the Apostles, and a really bad guy who is labeled an anarchist. Pulling from the 1890s, Cruise’s villains are all basically just Unabomber-like ideologues who want to end the world for vague reasons that have to do with generic anger over some ridiculous Philosophy 101 hang-up. They are all carbon-copies of Ra’s Al-Ghul in Batman Begins with nearly no variance.
In Top Gun: Maverick, as I pointed out in my original review of it, the bad guys building uranium plants are anybody you want them to be. They might be North Koreans, yet they are never named. Their faces are literally covered when you see them in the film.
What country are they from? Any country and no country.
That led my teenagers to joke that they were Mongolians. For all I know they could be Angolans. I sometimes like to think they are Canadians, just for the fun of it!
Ingredient #5 – The Hero remains sexless and at a distance from female companionship
Here’s where Cruise breaks from just about everything I know, including ancient epics, knights’ tales, and science fiction romps. His main character is a single bro who doesn’t really get into romantic entanglements, nor does he really fight for the ideals of love.
You might think of Top Gun: Maverick and say “wait a minute, he does have a gf in that.” Yes he does, and my wife used my phone during the movie to search for if Penny, his gf, was in the original movie or not. His Maverick character seems to fall in love again with her, even though the audience has never met her.
I say no to this. First, the Jennifer Connolly character is in the movie for no plot reason. She is entirely removable. Second, the final act of the movie is all dudes plus a female pilot. It’s an ‘80s action-movie rehashed. Maverick has not married or gotten entangled in a long-term relationship for his entire life. Since his life is Airforce fighter jets, his true love is the F-14 he enters in the end of the movie.
No one leaves that movie and thinks of Maverick and Penny. They think of planes and dogfighting!
Anyway, in Mission: Impossible, they barely try to inject character development for the females, certainly not for Cruise’s romantic interests, which are next to nothing.
I think the point is that Hunt is the secret-government power that supposedly protects us all, unseen yet effective, while Hunt’s wife is the normie lady living the normie life that can only exist because the secret-government agents routinely take out bad guys trying to end the world.
This strikes me as a modern fantasy of government effectiveness. It was a line used to support the War on Terror and ubiquitous surveillance. Cruise is completely in line with ruling-class ideology. Again, his movies are conservative, not in any principled way, but because they support or affirm the current order. (To Mission: Impossible, anybody not affirming that order is a possible terrorist threat.)
My Predictions for Mission: Impossible 7
Now that we have all of that down, and there’s probably more to the formula for sure, we can make a few predictions about the new Mission: Impossible movie that just came out a few days ago.
I promise I have seen nothing, nor have I read anything about it. I just know the title.
These are my best guesses about what will be in the movie.
My prediction is that Movie #7 will featuring a rogue-terrorist threat from inside the US government, a variation on the first movie in the series, in which Ethan Hunt was called a bad guy and hunted down as a terrorist threat.
This movie will collapse the internal-external dual threat dynamic of previous films into one particularly powerful internal force that is nevertheless a bad element of the US government.
Probably they will be seeking power to obtain or use nukes in unjust ways. They will call Hunt and his team “terrorists” and hunt them down, so Hunt becomes the hunted and the hunter simultaneously, which has what he has been in most of these movies, his name being a bit too obvious.
One reason to predict this is the series can’t keep creating fictional terrorist organizations of little to no weight in the real world. They also can’t keep having the CIA try to shut down the IMF yet remain on the good-guy side. If they do either of these again, the series threatens to become stale.
Cruise probably knows that making his hero a Hitchcockian figure, a wronged-man on the run from unknown powers, is a low-risk, high-reward move cinematically. The last three movies did this somewhat, and Top Gun did it a little bit, but if Cruise is doing a two-part extravaganza, I think he will go all-in on this.
Also, the next movie will feature a countdown clock, but not on a bomb. Probably on a missile or launch of some kind.
Regarding the romantic interests, I am betting they will make Ethan Hunt move closer to the Ilsa/Rebecca-Ferguson character romantically, yet this will be interrupted by Hunt’s need to save his normie, estranged wife once again. Probably she is on the rogue-government-element’s hitlist, just like he will be.
None of this really seems to matter much. The movies aren’t making bold political statements, ever, which leaves me to believe it will stay away from anything that smacks of January 6, Trump, the Russia-Ukraine war, or anything that will trigger people to talk down about Mission: Impossible.
Cruise is really good about talking around the culture wars without being in them. Whatever happens in these films will not be controversial. It will not be outside anybody’s Overton window, not even China’s or probably Vladimir Putin’s for that matter.
For Cruise designs movies that both your most liberal friend and Putin himself could enjoy, the ultimate and universal popcorn-chomper.
Well, that is, unless you are a rogue terrorist of no national origin with a countdown clock in your hands!