Mission Impossible 8: Final Reckoning: Firing on More Than All Cylinders

Well, as much as I really enjoyed the seventh Mission Impossible with Tom Cruise (MI: Dead Reckoning) when I streamed it on Paramount Plus this past May, and said I'd be back soon with a review of Final Reckoning (which was Part 2 of Dead Reckoning), which was opening soon in theaters and I intended to see ... well, the beaches on Cape Cod were just too tempting.

But I did manage to see MI: Final Reckoning tonight on Paramount Plus, where it started streaming yesterday, and I thought it was great, for all kinds of reasons.   Here, without spoilers, are some of them:

• As the eighth and (at this point, at least) the final Tom Cruise MI, Final Reckoning did a fine job of bringing into play elements from the previous seven movies.  I guess my favorite was bringing back the Phelps story, which made this eight-movie arc even more a direct descendant of Mission Impossible on television, where of course the story was born with Phelps in command.
• I said in my review of Dead Reckoning that the enemy being AI made Ethan Hunt more modern than Bond (at least so far).  In every Bond movie, an evil human being has been the prime enemy.  There were evil humans to be sure in Dead Reckoning and Final Reckoning, but the worst of the villains indubitably is an AI.   Thus not only did Final Reckoning delve into Terminator territory, you can throw in Tron, and while we're at it, War Games and lots of other literally bloodless arch-villians as well.   
• To be clear, as I've been saying in lots of places these days, I'm not concerned about AI replacing us, destroying us, or anything that's been a favorite of fiction at least since Karel Čapek's R.U.R more than a century ago.  And I like those fictions a lot -- but they're fictions.  And as far as fiction about AI goes, I prefer Asimov's robots/androids, who sometimes do us harm, but also do us a lot of good.
• Final Reckoning has some powerful star power.  Tom Cruise's Ethan Hall is a truly memorable character, because he's well written and as well as well acted.  Same for the MI team, both in Final Reckoning and the previous MI movies.  And I have to say Angela Bassett as US President was superb, as well all as all the other heroes and villains that play out a taut story in which millions if not billions of lives are at stake.  (It was also great to see Tramell Tillman -- Severance! -- in charge of a crucial vessel at sea.)
• And the action scenes are first rate in every natural environment on Planet Earth, that is, land, sea, and air.  In those scenes, Hunt is every bit as impressive as Bond.
• I'll just also say that in the midst of all this action, Final Reckoning has a deep and impressive moral core.

If I have any disappointment, well, Cruise has made clear that this is his last Ethan Hunt story.  I hope he changes his mind.  And gets the recognition he -- and everyone associated with this movie -- amply deserve.

See also Mission Impossible 7: Dead Reckoning: Well Beyond Bondian ... Mission Impossible 6: Fallout: Better (These Days) Than Bond ... Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol

Mission Impossible 7: Dead Reckoning: Well Beyond Bondian

With all the promotion of Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, set to debut in U.S. theaters in the next few days, I thought it was high time to see Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, released in 2023, and which is actually Part 1 of the two-part story which will conclude with The Final Reckoning.

So I saw Dead Reckoning on Paramount+ last night.  And I was struck by several things, all of which have been inexorably building over this eight-movie run, which, as we all know, began as one of the best television series in history:

1. Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt has been getting more and more like the best secret agent in movie history, i.e., James Bond.  Hunt is a far better fighter than anyone ever was in the Mission Impossible TV team.  In fact, the strength of that team resided in its group prowess, and while Hunt has an impressive group behind him, he clearly has powers not only equal to Bond's but sometimes approach Superman's.  I mean, he leaps more than tall buildings, and in Dead Reckoning he jumps off a jagged mountainside, high above a fast-moving train he's attempting to intercept.

2. Cruise's Hunt shares another Bondian characteristic: a penchant for beautiful women.  In Dead Reckoning there are at least a handful.  My favorite is Ilsa Faust, played by Rebecca Ferguson, most recently in a crucially starring role in Silo.  Much like Bond's women, Hunt's are not only beautiful but keenly intelligent and resourceful, and they're central to events in which the narrative turns.

3. Whereas the MI team on television were invited to lend a hand in reducing or stopping significant challenges to US security, Hunt and his crew are called upon to stop challenges to the world order that verge on jeopardizing humanity itself.   In it that sense, Hunt may be even a little more than Bondian, and in Dead Reckoning he approached Terminator territory, fighting an AI menace that -- in the opinion of at least some so-called experts -- has become since 2023 the greatest threat our species has faced, and in this case engendered.

I don't share that view, but I do look very much forward to see how it all turns out on the screen in The Final Reckoning very soon.

See also Mission Impossible 6: Fallout: Better (These Days) Than Bond ... Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol

Mission Impossible 6: Fallout: Better (These Days) Than Bond

Just saw the 6th Mission Impossible movie - Fallout - with Tom Cruise in the lead role as Ethan Hunt.  I thought it was outstanding - the best of the movies so far - and, yes, better than the Bond movies these days.

The dominant philosophic theme was a refutation of the utilitarian principle that the good of the many outweigh, or should outweigh, the good of the few as a motive for action.   We see this refuted at least three times in the movie, which begins with Hunt blowing a mission to save one of his team.  He later takes precious time to make sure that a French woman police officer survives a deadly encounter.  And in the one of the scenes in the movie, Ilsa struggles with whether to thoroughly choke out an arch villain while Benji dangles from a nearby noose and looses consciousness.

There's some excellent double-agent moves in which good guys turn out to be bad guys and vice versa.  And the action scenes - in bathrooms in Paris to cliffs in Kashmir - are top-notch and in some ways better than usual.   In the bathroom, a single bad guy gets the better of both Hunt and another agent, until - well, I don't want to give too much away.  But that's more realistic than we often see in scenes like this.

There's the best balance of tongue-in-cheekness about Mission Impossible tropes and using them to effective purpose in the narrative.   An early scene features Wolf Blitzer delivering a news report on CNN.  I had a feeling he was making up the report for MI purposes, but didn't guess that he was actually one of the MI team wearing a Wolf Blitzer mask.  After that, the cracks by disbelievers that the MI strategy of masks which just Halloween had an especially delicious irony.

Tom Cruise, I have to say,  did another fine job.  I never got the criticism of Cruise in this or any other role.  He delivers his Ethan Hunt character with just the right mix of grit, determination, self-awareness, and even self-deprecation.    I guess comparing these MI movies to Bond is apples and oranges.   But I will say that I liked Fallout more than last few Bond moves, which were certainly good cinema.

See also:  Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol

the Sierra Waters time-travel trilogy

Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol

Mission Impossible is back with its 4th movie, and one of the best - well, better than the 3rd, which was pretty good, but I'm not sure about the 1st and 2nd movies in the franchise, which were each in their own ways superb.

Alias, Lost, and Fringe fans (I'm a big one, though not of the ending of Lost), will be glad to know that J. J. Abrams is back, this time getting top producer credit (he directed MI3), and Josh Holloway puts in an appearance at the beginning.    The antes are raised nicely in MI4, with the Kremlin blown up, the US Defense Secretary killed (played by major actor Tom Wilkinson, making the death even more surprising, and all-out nuclear war at stake between the US and Russia.  This had an appealing retro flavor, and was refreshing in view of so many Islamic terrorists in movies and on television.

The MI slight-of-hand devices and impersonations were also in fine display - with a projector that makes the guard think he's looking at a far wall with no one in the room, even though Ethan and Benji are actually walking right by the guard into the guarded room - and a cool double feint in which the team splits up and fools two of the villain groups at the same time, keeping in touch via the comm at their disposal.  

As in all the MI stories, there are a couple of escapes that fall a little short of believability - Brandt's survival in the wind tunnel or whatever that was is the one that most comes to mind.  But these were balanced by the MI plans and strategies which don't work out - including failure to stop the launch of the Russian nuclear warhead toward the US - which gives the movie a good smack-in-the-face plausibility.

And the acting, including and especially Tom Cruise as Ethan, was excellent.  Jane (Paula Patton) and Sabine (Léa Seydoux) were both dangerous in different ways and good to look at.   The team - which was ghosted or put into non-existence when wrongly held responsible for the Kremlin bombing - accomplishes its mission in the end, and will clearly be back, as Ethan's new team, for another romp, I hope not too far in the future.

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Valkyrie and Defiance

I finally saw Valkyrie and Defiance last night on Netflix DVD - a Nazi true-story double-header in the household. As harrowing as such movies are, we watch them from the cushion of knowing we won the war, in the end - though not before horrendous damage was done to humanity, including the Holocaust.

Valkyrie was a reasonably good rendition of the daring 1944 Germany Army bomb plot that almost killed Hitler. Tom Cruise was effective as von Stauffenberg - who planted the bomb and in many ways spearheaded the operation - and Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp and Tom Wilkinson are a pleasure to see in any role.

The plot failed for several reasons. Hitler survived the bomb because it went off in a meeting room larger and more open than expected. Had the explosion occurred in the original room, its bunker construction would have contained and thereby made more lethal the explosive power. And the briefcase with the bomb was inadvertently moved to a place under the table where the blast was somewhat deflected from Hitler.

With Hitler alive, the only chance the plot had was for the conspirators to quickly wrest power from the Gestapo, and this turn in depended on the belief that Hitler had perished in the explosion. Hitler's voice on the phone to a key army official was the decisive turning point depicted in the movie. I favor the interpretation that Hitler's voice on radio, the day after the explosion, was even more decisive, because the radio reached everyone (see The Soft Edge for more), but the point remains about the power of the voice to save or change everything in an age of telephone and radio. Given the capacity for spoofing and deception in the digital age, that power may no longer exist today.

Defiance tells the heroic, inspiring story of the four Bielski brothers, who escape into the forest and organize resistance after the German occupation and slaughter of Jews in Belarus in 1941. Daniel Craig as Tuvia, Liev Schreiber as Zus, and Jamie Bell as Asael are simply superb, and I'd say Defiance was one the best movies I've seen in years (better than the excellent Munich, in which Craig also played a take-no-prisoners Jewish fighter, and better than Valkyrie). My wife and I have grandparents and relatives who come from that area, and we could see their faces and hear their voices in this movie.

All of the brothers - and their love interests (it was good see Mia Wasikowska, Sophie on In Treatment, play Asael's in Defiance) - survived against all odds, and our knowing that Tuvia, Zus, and Aron (who was a boy in 1941) made it to New York after the war, and opened a trucking business, was especially satisfying. (Asael joined the Russians against the Germans and was killed in action.) Tuvia died at 81 in 1987, Zus at 82 in 1995, and Aron is still alive.

So, yes, the bomb plot failed, the Bielskis did not, and we beat the Nazis.

But as the extremist part of the debate now raging about health care reform in America now shows - with some opponents of Obama likening him to Hitler, which is itself a classic Hitlerian propaganda tactic (false association and insistent exaggeration) - we need to take care more than ever to keep our democratic processes and protections real and robost. The Weimar Republic, which the Nazis overthrew, was after all a democracy too...