The Evolution of Impossible

The Evolution of Impossible

For nearly 30 years, the Mission: Impossible franchise has performed a high-wire act between extreme physical action and a world of virtuality. As The Final Reckoning (2025) closes the book on Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), it’s fitting to take stock of the franchise’s enduring visual and auditory motifs, and its evolving relationship with suspense, illusion, performance, and realism. Despite being multi-million-dollar blockbusters, and with a subject matter that suggests a closeness to capitalism, Cold War ideology and so on, the structure of the films and their productions still displayed an genuine interest with the nature of cinema.

Most importantly, M:I is a director's franchise. The early films were directed by masterful stylists (Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, and Brad Bird), and their different temperaments allow the missions, the IMF agents, and Ethan Hunt's character to swing in wildly different ways. When Christopher McQuarrie took the reins with Rogue Nation (2015), the franchise shifted into a more serialized structure. Yet McQuarrie’s improvisational, utilitarian approach, coupled with Cruise’s increasing creative control, allowed each film to pivot in tone and theme while maintaining a through-line of escalating physical stakes.

In The Final Reckoning, the plotting of M:I films found its logical endpoint, where it only deals in extremes. Here, the highest stake must be reached, the most dangerous stunt must be performed, and Ethan's iconic debrief tape must be given by the U.S. President herself (Angela Bassett). "The Entity," the reality-altering AI introduced in the previous Dead Reckoning (2023), is threatening nuclear apocalypse, and the society itself has sunken into anarchy. As Ethan races against time to retrieve the AI's source code in the ruins of a submarine called "The Sevastopol", the film also constructs a visual metaphor of descent, a vertical journey towards the abyss: Ethan descends through dungeons, bunkers, and the wreckage of the submarine Sevastopol, while his team, including Benji (Simon Pegg) and Grace (Hayley Atwell), navigates the desolate arctic wilderness. The mission becomes a journey through Hell—with Heaven just out of reach. These vertical metaphors, of descent and eventual ascent, provide visual coherence to a film otherwise heavy with exposition, callbacks, and thematic overload.

This spatial tension—between high and low—runs throughout the series. Many crucial assets (lists, keys, drives) lie buried or hidden, but Ethan almost always strikes from above. And after retrieving them, he often loses them, only to ascent again. These literal ups and downs mirror Cruise’s own gravity-defying stunts, but more than elevation or danger, his essence lies in an art of suspension. The most iconic M:I moments—Ethan dangling in the CIA vault or clinging to planes and cliffs—aren’t about falling or flying, but holding still, midair, mid-mission, in perfect tension.

Horizontally, there is also a key action scene: Cruise's sprint. Parallel to a burning fuse, the run physically enforces the danger of suspense. When running isn't enough, Ethan rides also motorcycles and sport cars. In the most extreme case, the vertical and the horizontal must align in the most extravagant fashion: in Dead Reckoning, Ethan rides a motorcycle off a cliff, parachuting onto a speeding Oriental Express.

The foundation of this iconography began with De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (1996), particularly the CIA heist sequence where Ethan drops silently into a surveillance room. This scene, referencing 2001: A Space Odyssey, places Ethan in a pristine, hypermodern space reminiscent of Kubrick’s astronauts—alone, suspended, and controlled by machines. While the black vault's design was inspired by Kubrick's film, the rhythm of the scene also recalls HAL's surgical murders of the astronauts with intercuts between the actor's tension, noises from the computer interface, as well as the silence of the machines. Finally, Ethan's character in the first film was not unlike that of Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), whose solitude in a space surrounded by technology brings out calm and calculating demeanors, shaped by the logic of their missions as both a master of and captive to technology. In confronting an artificial intelligence, both become almost inhuman—yet unpredictably human in moments of instinct and fate.

For De Palma, M:I was about mise-en-scène and mechanics—actions and reactions. In cinema, actions create momentum and reversal, where suspense emerges from preparation, and order unravels through chaos. The iconic mission briefings are like scenarios: blueprints for what may go wrong. McQuarrie reworks this logic by showing imagined outcomes first—hypothetical versions of missions that later prove false. These “flash-forwards” also echo the title sequences, which montage fragments of the entire film into a visual premonition, much like "The Entity" scanning every possible future. Only M:I II (2000) and M:I III (2006) deviate from this formula in favor of abstraction, somehow matching the sensitivity of its filmmakers: for Woo, it is a pompously figurative exaggeration, and for Abrams it is pure acceleration. The latter’s MacGuffin is often a narrative motor, free of meaning.

As noted by film theorist Nicole Brenez, De Palma's film is pronounced in its treatment to seemingly trivial actions that are subliminal to the film's meaning. Brenez notes a shot from a love scene: "Claire kisses Ethan on the cheek and he, intrigued, retraces the gesture on his lips. A spy down to the tips of his toes: he prefers signs to the real thing." If that sentence crystallizes Ethan's strange sexual tension with Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), Woo's Mission: Impossible II makes Ethan the most archetypical romantic. Woo's film is particularly bizarre because while it mystifies Ethan/Cruise, but also makes his image overwhelming with excess. Echoing the filmmaker's earlier Face/Off (1997), M:I II features an evil doppelgänger who wears Ethan's face and in the end collides with the hero in a symbolic showdown. In these impossible slow-motion shots and decorative movements, the film offers a figural and erotic deception to both the character and the mission.

Abrams' Mission: Impossible III (2006) reverses course by grounding Ethan in domesticity: a would-be family man in his marriage to Julia (Michelle Monaghan). Although that family life represents the true "impossible" of the film, it sets up Ethan's moralization in McQuarrie's films within the context of professionalism. While the first two films had Ethan going from hotels to safe-houses, Abrams frames his dual life in two "homes": his house with Julia and the IMF headquarters. Ethan's humanization is also contrasted with the villainous arms dealer Owen Davian, played by a menacing Philip Seymour Hoffman. As we have noted about Abrams' narrative tendency, the film's opening is particularly striking by putting the audience directly in the mist of the story——Julia's kidnapping and Ethan's interrogation——only to reveal it later as a misdirection. Abrams’ love of mystery boxes becomes a structural device: story through withholding. One amusing sequence reveals a detail usually ignored in the masquerade business, when Ethan must impersonate Davian using a mask, but first needs to forcibly record his voice—prompting him mid-fight to repeat key phrases for a voice-matching device. The film’s central MacGuffin, “The Rabbit’s Foot,” remains undefined—a mystery later repurposed in The Final Reckoning as the origin of “The Entity.” While Abrams explores the tension between love and duty, McQuarrie has no illusions when revisiting this thread in Fallout (2018): Ethan and Julia can only meet as ghosts, their bond preserved in absence. This uneasy relation now dictates Ethan's romanticism, which reached a perfect balance with his chemistry with Rebecca Ferguson's British agent Ilsa Faust, the revelation of Rouge Nation.

From Ghost Protocol (2011) and on, M:I films builds a progressing mythology on Ethan and the IMF: constantly disavowed by the system, but always morally righteous. The first M:I film released after the introduction of iPhone. Then technologies of virtuality reigns supreme, and Bird’s Pixar sensibility yield a light, playful tone while introducing an atomic-level threat for the first time. Meanwhile, in contrast with the series' deeper interest on visual illusions——from projecting false images in the Kremlin to playing switcheroo at the Burj Khalifa hotel——Tom Cruise also rebrands M:I as a true stunt spectacle, with his vertical climb on world's tallest building. However, his hardly-working climbing gadget also showcases the series' tension between the real and the fiction.

It is also clear that, from Ghost Protocol and on, the M:I films' plotting would be primarily dictated by each film's biggest stunts, where the rest of the films were written around them. In McQuarrie's four films, such approaches resulted in varied tones and strange disjoints between spectacle of the stunts and the narrative intrigues. In Rogue Nation, the opening plane stunt is pure spectacle, but the film’s soul lies in the opera assassination sequence—a nod to Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. These two sequences are also statements from the filmmakers that M:I remains a franchise that remembers the history of cinema, as well as setting itself as a messiah for cinematic realism. The heart of the film also lies in the shifting loyalty of Ilsa Faust, whose waltz with Ethan hangs between professional and romantic. Ethan’s bond with Ilsa lies in mutual understanding and professional alignment, where unfulfilled desire is held in suspension.

In fact, the weights of these McQuarrie films are often found in its casting: Ferguson's noir-ish presence, as well as the stillness of Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), gives Rouge Nation a classic Hollywood flare; Henry Cavill's muscular August Walker fit perfectly with the bombastic Fallout; both Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning featured a varied lineup of character actors, inducing these films with small gestures that often escape the main action. Fans of the films revel in the sincerity of Luther (Ving Rhames), the outlandishness of Venessa Kirby's The White Widow, the dramatic line readings of Tramell Tillman's Caption Bledsoe, or the quirks of Esai Morales, whose villainous presence as Gabriel often slips into melodramatic acting or comical evil laughter. These clashing performance styles reflect McQuarrie’s ambitions—tonally varied to the brink of incoherence, yet somehow held together by spectacular set pieces or narrative sleights of hand. Particularly, Dead Reckoning thrives in this looseness, especially in its final train sequence, where disparate characters converge in a near-operatic alignment of plot and mise-en-scène.

Meanwhile, McQuarrie sharpens Ethan Hunt into a moral myth. In Fallout, Ethan's refusal to sacrifice his team becomes the film's standpoint. In Rogue Nation, Alec Baldwin declares him “the living manifestation of destiny,” a line as ludicrous as it is prophetic. This description curiously applies just as well to "The Entity," Ethan’s ultimate adversary—a nonhuman force that reframes every previous villain as a reflection of his own choices. The Final Reckoning even ties Ethan’s fate to two past actions: stealing “The Rabbit’s Foot” in M:I III, which led to the creation of "The Entity", and the heist from the first film, which accidentally exiled an analyst who would become the only person to know the location of "The Sevastopol". Thus, the series ends in miraculous fashion, where D.W. Griffith’s “last-minute rescue” became an almost spiritual resolution.

A final reversal arrives at the end of The Final Reckoning. Paris (Pom Klementieff), once Gabriel’s assassin, redeems herself by saving Benji; Ethan, after chasing Gabriel through an aerial dogfight, once again falls from the sky—only to suspend midair once more, fulfilling his mission just before impact. Like in the first film’s iconic drop, he never quite hits the ground.

wirtten by HB