Towards a Light We Cannot See

On Mission: Impossible, Swamp Dogg, and procedure

Written by

erie mitchell

Returning to the first Mission: Impossible movie in 2025 is an interesting experience. Nowadays when you think Mission: Impossible you think death defying stunts with a pioneer spirit, boldly going where no action movie dares to go. Tom Cruise has clung to the side of a plane, scaled the world’s tallest building, and trained to hold his breath for over six minutes, all to chase the dragon of complete immersion in the spectacle, testing the limits of the human body with only the most essential of safety precautions taken, for the entertainment pleasure of millions.

1996’s Mission: Impossible, when viewed from this lens, reads as somewhat muted, operating far below the kinetic bar Cruise himself has raised across the decades. This is a spy movie that foregrounds spycraft, or a Hollywood version of it. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt tracks moles and deciphers Biblical references, chugging along to director Brian de Palma’s well-honed thriller beats. There is a proper action sequence with explosions and everything at the end, but it’s a bit of a weak point and upon rewatch felt out of place, a somewhat goofy ending to the tightly wound mystery that was set up.

The set piece everyone remembers, arguably the most iconic of the franchise, features Cruise suspended inches above the floor in CIA’s headquarters while trying to hack the mainframe and steal a list. There’s no death-defying heights and not a single explosion, not even a little one. As it’s a break in the thieves cannot make a sound without triggering the CIA’s advanced alarm system, so the entire set piece is conducted in silence. Yet it endures by sheer technical wizardry, ratcheting up the tension to where individual drops of sweat are used to great effect. It transcends the sides of a screen and becomes pure art, with the trappings of a heist sequence as its canvas.

If, having seen Mission: Impossible, you were told that Tom Cruise injured himself in a stunt and asked what stunt, the vault scene or the train/helicopter clash at the end would be your guess. But neither would be correct. On the Paramount studio lot, Tom Cruise badly injured his ankle when the giant restaurant fish tank exploded. This didn’t involve any vehicles or aerial suspension, it was staged in a soundstage, and not only was he injured but there was concern that he might also drown.

At the time of Mission: Impossible’s filming, the name Tom Cruise meant something very different to the average moviegoer. He had been a Scientologist since 1986 but this was less discussed, with no viral videos of him defending the religion or messy divorces that brought certain aspects of his worldview to light. Mission: Impossible arguably wasn’t even his biggest movie of the year; he would receive an Oscar nomination for Jerry Maguire, playing a sports agent. This was a typical Cruise role around this time, he was the Rain Man guy who played lawyers and appeared in Scorcese movies. There was definitely some action, with Days of Thunder and Top Gun, but while he insisted on doing his own stunts even in Top Gun, he was confined to the inside of a plane he wasn’t allowed to pilot, with no real acrobatics to center outside of a memorable volleyball sequence.

Somewhere along the line, things took a turn. The Tom Cruise of today is the “President of movies”, “Hollywood’s last true star”. At time of writing, Mission: Impossible is the 17th highest grossing movie franchise of all time, what has turned into his personal stunt sandbox is between Pirates of the Caribbean and Shrek for all time gross and could surpass the former by the end of The Final Reckoning’s run.

Before my showing of The Final Reckoning, a video of Cruise played where he thanked everyone for experiencing the movie in the cinema, and for continuing to support the cinematic experience in 2025. What follows is a hundred and sixty minute-long feature film adaptation of this video. The Entity—an immensely powerful artificial intelligence model represented by a swirling blue cloud echoing mid 2010s Marvel designs—has infiltrated the world’s governments and telecommunication networks, deepfaking videos and distorting the truth at will while whittling away at nuclear safeguards.

The audience doesn’t see this dystopia through anyone’s eyes. We don’t follow Ethan Hunt on the ground, infiltrating an AI-led splinter group that wants to bring the world under the Entity’s control. Deepfake videos aren’t actually used to trick anyone on screen, which could have been a clever twist on the classic Mission: Impossible mask reveal. And none of what I’m saying is even a spoiler because this movie doesn’t play out in the Entity’s reality; the first minute or so of the movie is a laborious voiceover that tells us the global state of affairs (and in an AI monotone that feels weirdly inspired by sissy hypno. If you don’t know what that means, don’t look it up.)

Oh the Entity is everywhere in this movie, but again we know that because every ten minutes or so someone has to grit their teeth and go “we live in the Entity’s reality”, often Nick Offerman’s straightlaced general who in situation room meetings acts as a mouthpiece for the American military industrial complex while talking to the wartime president, played here by Angela Bassett. For the life of me I can’t remember what these characters are called and luckily you don’t have to, by this point in the franchise they might as well be named Angela Bassett and Nick Offerman and Mark Gatiss.

And unlike previous installments, far less effort is taken to maintain the spy movie scaffolding that surrounds these discussions. This movie was originally titled Dead Reckoning Part 2, and even as Part 1 introduces the Entity and sets the stage for the inevitable man versus machine climax, it still feels like a Mission: Impossible movie. Cruise is disavowed, there’s an early sequence where everyone is following everyone and MacGuffins come into play, a car chase in the middle, with everything culminating in a big action set piece that shows off Cruise’s latest childhood wish fulfillment. Along the way nothing matters except the mission and the lovable IMF team, and when push comes to shove Cruise always risks it all to save his friends.

The poster for The Final Reckoning doesn’t have any helicopters in it. It doesn’t have motorcycle chases through winding mountain passes or leaping from low-flying airplanes. It’s Cruise looking straight at the viewer with some dirt on his face, clearly having been through a fight but still hanging in there, still a figurehead, a symbol of the limits of what one person can achieve.

That basically sets the tone for how subtle this movie’s political messaging is. Characters basically vlog themselves talking directly to the audience about the dangers of AI and how everything has led up to this mission, this audacious globe-trotting reckoning. There are no quiet moments, no turning up the pressure. Every event is the most important and most dramatic event in human history. The score becomes a wall of sound, you feel like you just hit legs and arms and back and still have to run a couple miles to cool down.

If you’re tired of hearing about how AI is everywhere and it’s going to take your jobs and sleep with your wife and you just want a big popcorn action movie, while this is a big popcorn action movie, it bides its time for the big popcorn action to hit. The first hour is mostly conversations in neon lit rooms or hallways about how the Entity is sleeping with our collective wife, told in a blunt, Hollywood way that if it’s heard of subtlety, thinks it’s some weird European fad.

Tom Cruise was in Europe, London to be precise, in 2017. He was filming a scene for Mission: Impossible - Fallout where he runs for some time (a first for a Cruise action scene) before leaping between buildings. Because it’s Cruise he did it himself, and everything was going smoothly until he had to leap to the other building, at which point he broke his ankle. This forced production to halt for several months as he recovered and he was still in recovery while he shot some talky scenes, leaning on a table while talking to Secretary Alec Baldwin. If you saw Fallout and thought the impact from that jump looked realistic, they used the take where the actual injury took place.

Across the Mission: Impossibles, the role of a Hollywood movie and the sway it can have over an audience has changed considerably. For decades the absolute peak of immersive art was a big budget action movie, with climatic fights that made your hair stand up and propulsive scores that kept everything ticking over, punctuated by big orchestral swells during a twist or a particularly large explosion. To a viewing public without the internet, or even one with YouTube videos that buffered on their dial-up internet plans, this was the pinnacle of entertainment, a family would pay for tickets for Mom and Dad and the kids and get a large popcorn or two to share without a second thought because that, for art available to the masses, was it. Cinemas got louder, they added 3D, IMAX aspect ratios for maximum available action, and seat-rattling sound systems to match.

In 2025, according to the National Restaurant Association, 75% of all orders from restaurants are for takeout. Not many goods have gotten cheaper over the last 10-15 years, but TVs have, and now more people than ever have massive screens to watch the latest Netflix show on. Or not watch it, as Netflix themselves have directed screenwriters to have characters essentially announce the plot out loud so those looking at their phones can keep up.

These days, immersion is a world of screens that tell you exactly what you want to hear while you eat food from wherever you want, all in the comfort of your home. Hollywood no longer has a psychic monopoly on our attention; there’s still a lot of money involved and a lot of people saw The Final Reckoning during its opening week and even more saw Lilo and Stitch but the medium of cinema, an hour and a half long motion picture made by trained actors over several years that you see by paying for a ticket in a theater, is getting old. Increasingly the tricks that made movies successful—and they are tricks, this is the business of show where lights and sounds are arranged to place the audience under a spell—are being outmoded by an endless elevator of reels and shorts and TikToks, an overpowering flood of entertainment and information increasingly generated by AI that is increasingly being trained on content it created.

Cruise’s speech before The Final Reckoning, and the frankly desperate energy throughout, all exist in response to this status quo. The President of Movies recording the equivalent of an apology video essentially thanking each person for coming to see his movie in the cinema feels an awful lot like Jeb Bush asking individual people for votes, a human touch crushed under the inevitable deluge of data we swim through every day. This is perhaps the most go-for-broke Mission: Impossible yet, with perhaps the most impressive stunts in the franchise. What Cruise does on the side of an airplane in this makes his previous plane hanging effort in Rogue Nation look tame, to say nothing of the submarine sequence with its spinning walls and constantly changing water level. It’s several minutes of pure thrills pressed onto a screen with a rolling pin. Yet Cruise can’t just show these sequences to us and let them speak for themselves. He has to do the one thing he’s pushed away his whole career: be the flesh and blood person named Tom Cruise and sell himself, no tricks. No personas, no Ethan Hunt or Jack Reacher or Maverick.

In the TikTok era, authenticity is worth its weight in gold. The humble YouTube vlog has had a total cultural victory, reality is now someone in their room staring into the camera while they advertise themselves, or advertise a product to help them advertise themselves. You may be reading this on Substack, a platform designed to echo the personal blog of the 2000s, but venture into the Notes page (or God forbid, the Reels) and the race for algorithmic engagement bait is identical to X or Instagram or especially LinkedIn. People selling themselves, or selling ways to sell themselves. The Final Reckoning, downstream of all of this, acts as a three hundred million dollar video interview for the concept of cinema. In doing so, it takes its eye off the ball, and for long stretches forgets that it does have to be a movie that entertains on its own terms. The end supplies the thrills, but it does so while not 100% sure you aren’t looking at your phone while they’re happening.

While the setpieces in The Final Reckoning are obviously a total risk to life and limb, maybe the most nakedly unconcerned with personal safety Cruise has been during the franchise actually occurred in 1999, while filming the second Mission: Impossible movie (actually typing out its title requires far too many colons, I simply won’t do it). The credits roll over him appearing to free climb at dizzying heights on a Utah mountain, and while he did wear a safety harness he also did all the jumps with his bare hands. Production for this was as rocky as the faces he climbed: powerful winds whipped at him while, as revealed later, he already had a broken foot, and tore his shoulder on one particular jump, all the while pushing to do take after take to get it right as even action maestro John Woo thought it was all a bit much.

There’s been a lot of “final” franchise movies lately, either in the form of legacy sequels where aging actors return for one last ride (the recent Halloween movies, Blade Runner: 2049, The Matrix Resurrections) or movies like The Final Reckoning or No Time to Die which bids goodbye to the audience for the foreseeable future. For decades, Hollywood has kicked the can down the road by increasingly relying on franchises and big-budget adaptations of existing media to appeal to audiences with increasingly more entertainment options, in the process hopping on a number of different trends. Spy movies gave way to space operas, in the 80s everything had to be Die Hard, in the 2000s we saw the early glow of the superhero inferno, along with a larger push for nostalgic properties in movies that saw franchises based on children’s toys like Transformers rake in billions. A number of breadwinners have come and gone, yet more seem to be going than coming these days. The last new franchise to really gain traction has been Dune, which while financially successful isn’t exactly Star Wars. Speaking of Star Wars, after waiting a decade for a new one there were five movies in five years, with poorly received entries like Rise of Skywalker torching any goodwill built up along the way. There hasn’t been a new Star Wars movie since then, despite entire trilogies being announced and then dropped, because nobody can make one that’s a guaranteed hit. Once the biggest certainty in cinema, it now languishes on Disney+, churning out increasingly intertwined and convoluted shows with one hit for every two to three released. Lord of the Rings is a show now as well, this time on Amazon Prime. Critics and audiences aren’t the biggest fans, but Amazon has to keep going because it cost a billion dollars to make. Marvel lurches towards the next two Avengers movies, with each installment more financially disappointing than the last.

Hollywood is still making hits, but they rarely hit the billion dollar mark, and in general are far less predictable than, say, before the pandemic. The works of individual directors like Barbenheimer can smash and an adaptation can strike the right chord like A Minecraft Movie, but these are one offs, and more importantly are somewhat gimmicky. People saw A Minecraft Movie because it’s a movie adaptation of Minecraft, the thing they have actual nostalgia for. Showings went viral as people threw popcorn and screamed and did everything possible to disrupt the sanctity of the movie theater that has been the foundation of Hollywood for a century, and the studio responded by encouraging all of that because it’s what actually got people to turn up. As the franchises dry up, expect more desperate swings for a moment as that has a chance to go viral and actually reach an audience.

Mission: Impossible, like other franchises, is ending, at least for now, at least this team. As I watched it, I couldn’t help but compare it to No Time to Die, the equivalent swan song from the other dominant spy franchise of this century. Both send off the lead characters, and the teams and worlds they helped create, yet they take radically different approaches to the final adventure. No Time to Die feels like a Bond movie, just with an air of finality around it. There’s a villain with a private island and a facial deformity, there’s an elusive woman, he trots around the globe using gadgets to defeat henchmen. AI hadn’t really taken off and warped all discussion, especially as No Time to Die was filmed before the pandemic, prior to being delayed to 2021. The Bond franchise is as prestigious a property as cinema has ever produced, and the weight of that history carried the movie to its final moments. Some emotional stakes were added, but ultimately this was one more outing for the venerable 007. The Final Reckoning, by contrast, feels warped beyond recognition by current events, entertaining for stretches yet often gets in its own way by forcing callbacks to previous movies, often in the form of clunky retcons that sometimes gets too goofy even for Mission: Impossible. Bond has the advantage of a cavalcade of iconic images: the Aston Martin DB5, M’s office, the villain’s lair. It can play through the hits and tweak its story to give them a sendoff. The Final Reckoning has to not only fight for its own relevance, but for everything Cruise has built up across thirty years.

The day before I saw The Final Reckoning, I caught Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted at my local arthouse theater. I’ve spent a lot of this piece criticizing The Final Reckoning, but I didn’t hate it, there’s enough there where if you’re a fan of the franchise it’s absolutely worth seeing. There are absolutely no qualifiers in my opinion of Swamp Dogg, it instantly became one of my favorites of the year and if you can catch it in theaters or at home, drop whatever you’re doing and check it out. Ostensibly a documentary about an iconic underground musician, it becomes somewhat of a hangout movie in the process, cutting between old interviews and performances to the present day where Swamp Dogg shows off his house and his lovably eccentric roommates that make music there. There are animated sections and a cooking show, and generally it’s as full of life and artistic spirit as any movie I’ve ever seen.

Yet as I saw them back to back, I couldn’t help but see both as career bookends. In the movie, Swamp Dogg celebrates his eightieth birthday, and it’s a joy to see everyone celebrate life around the eponymous pool, yet all the present day segments have this tinge of sadness to them. Swamp Dogg and Guitar Shorty and Moogstar seem to mostly hang out and swap stories about old times, and while they do create new art it’s obvious that, more than in previous decades, it’s for them, to keep them busy and creative, to give their life meaning. An interviewer asks “Are you enjoying being a legend?” to which Swamp Dogg replies “What else can I do? Can’t figure out how to get out of this thing.” His vibrancy shines through the screen but he’s also eighty years old, he’s not touring and recording at Atlantic Records anymore. His life has become repetitive, procedural.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with procedural. The appeal of Mission: Impossible is that it’s essentially a big budget Law and Order or The Blacklist, going through well-worn plot motions with central characters who exist to elicit predictable audience reactions and move the plot along. Benji’s character is that he’s the hacker who often cracks jokes. Luther also is the hacker that cracks jokes but he’s more jaded and more loyal to Ethan than the IMF. Jeremy Renner basically plays himself. It’s essentially a Hollywood version of the SVU talking their cases into existence, catching the bad guy, prosecuting, rinse, repeat. The bomb never reaches zero, the world survives, Ethan defeats the villain. The entertainment is in the procedure, the act of fighting the henchmen to free the hostage or swinging off the building to break into the vault. Cruise has built his career as an action star off predictability, reliability, and procedure.

Tom Cruise was in London with his family in early July 2024 when he turned 62. He has ridden motorcycles and flown planes and ran towards danger for almost forty years, but he is still human, and no matter how much time he spends recovering from broken bones or work he gets done on his movie star face, he’s getting old. Franchises are ending nowadays, but Cruise’s position as President of Movies doesn’t seem to have a term limit. Through sheer dedication to cinema and the old ways of entertainment, he’s cemented his superstar legacy, now the man to represent our species in the climactic final fight with the machines. David Ellison, the billionaire son of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, recently acquired Paramount and has been a producer on Mission: Impossible movies since Ghost Protocol. He seems to be a massive action fan and has the means to keep pumping out Cruise vehicles until the Sun goes out.

The real reason there has to be a Final Reckoning is simply that Cruise can’t run forever. His life has been filled with premieres and helicopter flights and increasingly younger wives for decades, but soon it'll all be over. His star will burn for a very long time, he has enough stories to fill a thousand interviews and documentaries, especially if he ever turns on the Church of Scientology. Yet in the day to day, his life will functionally consist of sitting around a pool, swapping stories of old times.

I won’t say how The Final Reckoning ends, only that I’m not the biggest fan, after over two and a half hours of pure dramatic spectacle it’s a bit of a squib. But if you think of the movie as the end of a chapter for Cruise, who was always bigger than the franchise and had his hand in every creative aspect, it adds the necessary pathos to ground it and is ultimately more than worth seeing. Go for the thrills, stay for Cruise walking towards, as Luther puts it “a light we cannot see.”

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