I watched The Final Reckoning, the eighth film in the Mission: Impossible franchise, on the day it was released. Coming out of that theatre, I felt a regret I had never felt before — I had watched MI8 so early that I would have to seethe in fury for a couple of weeks while waiting for everyone else to catch up.

But the stakes in The Final Reckoning?

“it is written”

The main plot of MI8 is that our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his nemesis Gabriel (Esai Morales) are racing to control the superhuman rogue AI called “the Entity”. The Entity was Gabriel’s boss in the previous movie, Dead Reckoning Part One, but it fired him after he failed to retrieve MacGuffin A, losing it to Ethan. Now, Gabriel believes he can hijack the Entity by combining MacGuffins B and C. He steals MacGuffin B from Ethan’s team at the start of the movie. Meanwhile, Ethan also needs MacGuffins B and C to destroy the Entity. Thus, Ethan has no choice but to get MacGuffin C, and then chase down Gabriel to get MacGuffin B back, risking losing both should he fail. In their final showdown, Gabriel says some variation of “it is written,” to boast (correctly) that Ethan has no choice but to fall into his traps.

However, Gabriel’s plan is not the only one that is written. The Entity has a plan, too! In MI7, the Entity was established to be a formidable adversary, outwitting Ethan and his team in ways only a superhuman AI could, such as hijacking their voice communications with fake audio. It was intelligent beyond comprehension, and inhuman in its means. Naturally, in MI8, the Entity becomes unfathomably stupid. It knows that Ethan (by having MacGuffin A) is the only one who can destroy it — yet it decides to set off the events of this movie by revealing its plan to him. The Entity explains that it has spent the 2 months since the previous movie making deepfakes, sowing discord online, and assembling a doomsday cult. In 4 days it will take over the world’s nuclear arsenals and use them to bring humanity to its knees. The one thing the Entity lacks is a nuclear bunker of its own, but it thinks it can goad Ethan into helping it find one.

I don’t understand why the Entity tells Ethan the truth about its plans, nor why Ethan himself then chooses to believe that it is the truth. For the rest of the movie, he and his team talk about the Entity’s plan as if they are certain about what it is going to do, and as if they know how it will react to their attempts to subvert it. Yet, all of their predictions come true. The mighty AI finds itself reduced to a deterministic computer program, with no agency beyond what its instructions told it to do. Despite supposedly being the villain, the Entity barely even counts as a character in this movie.

Even worse, while revealing its plan, the Entity also taunts Ethan about what might happen if he tries to stop it, showing Ethan’s team getting blown up while standing on some sea ice, and a low-altitude chase between two biplanes. Even though they are fake videos, the settings are correct, and we are taught by the other characters to believe it. I think the writers were trying to create a sense of danger and impossibility, but instead they created boredom. Many reviews, even positive ones, slam the movie’s 3 hour runtime and sluggish pacing in the early acts, but MI8 could be 2 hours long and still feel this way. As if we were forced to watch a spoiler-laden trailer right before the movie, the audience is left waiting for the action sequences that the Entity teased, and nothing in between has any stakes because you already know that Ethan is going to make it to the next thing.

When you’re finally watching those action sequences, the stakes are still ruined because the writers don’t lean into the tension created by the teasers. “Whatever you do, stay off the ice!” Ethan warns his team, before he disappears on a solo adventure which ends with him diving under sea ice into a sunken submarine loaded with torpedoes. We’re waiting for that explosion to become a real threat, but the torpedoes just roll around and do nothing. Grace (Hayley Atwell) ex machina eventually saves Ethan from drowning by going onto the ice anyway, with literally no consequences.

Ironically, the only major character that does not reveal their plan is Ethan himself, who keeps a tight lip so that the US government — and the audience — won’t figure out what he’s up to. He repeats many times that nobody, not even himself, is to be trusted with the power of the Entity, and that’s supposed to justify his solo questing on the eve of nuclear apocalypse. At some point, I was rooting for the CIA director, who was so convinced of Ethan’s simultaneous incompetence and disloyalty that he took matters into his own hands.

the real villain

Not once, but twice, a major plot point in The Final Reckoning depends on defusing one of Gabriel’s nuclear time bombs by sabotaging one of its detonators, ensuring that the resulting asymmetric explosion will not make the core go critical. However, the person disarming the bomb is in danger because the detonators will still explode when the timer reaches zero. That’s pretty realistic and intelligent, and it’s supposed to enhance Gabriel as an evil mastermind who toys with people like Luther (Ving Rhames) before killing them.

Meanwhile, the Entity can’t be taken seriously either. Even as a thoughtless program marching forward in its predetermined plan, the Entity had potential to be a compelling part of the movie. However, besides some deepfakes, the Entity is never shown doing anything. Instead, its role is reduced to being told — a big map occasionally turns red as the Entity “takes over” other countries’ nukes. The writers missed a huge opportunity to make the threat feel real, by showing doomsday cultists armed with the Entity’s weapons, killing and hijacking their way up the nuclear chain of command in another country like Israel. Instead, the screen time is dedicated to USA headquarters, the only place in the world where nothing has happened yet, where the characters stand around talking about what is happening everywhere else. (Nevertheless, Angela Bassett does a great job portraying President Sloane’s struggle to do the right thing.)

Neither Gabriel nor the Entity play an active role in challenging Ethan and his team throughout most of the movie. In their place is the real villain of the movie: physics. Besides the overly-detailed nuclear bomb defusal scenes, MI8 puts physics in the spotlight during the second act. Tom Cruise has to dodge propeller blades, avoid getting crushed by torpedoes, squeeze through small openings, drown, and recover from decompression sickness. Physics is not an inherently bad villain; the sequence of Ethan climbing the Burj Khalifa in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol comes to mind as a nail-biting portrayal of Ethan versus gravity.

However, physics is not executed nearly as well in MI8. The Burj Khalifa sequence contained maximum stakes (the tallest building), with a clear danger (falling off). Meanwhile, the submarine sequence neuters itself off the bat by placing the wreck in the relatively shallow waters of the Bering Strait. If the submarine had sank anywhere else, Ethan’s plan would be doomed. There are myriad invisible dangers because most audience members simply have no idea how dangerous diving is, thus most of the scene proceeds without a sense of danger at all. In a room half-filled with air, Ethan even has time to contemplate two corpses before leisurely meandering to the location of MacGuffin C, which he unceremoniously unlocks using MacGuffin A — an anticlimactic end to 1.5 movies of build-up. Once the submarine starts rolling, there is finally some time pressure, but Ethan’s escape involves him ripping off his suit and rawdogging a rapid ascent through the frigid waters, the very thing that the audience was told would kill him. Spoiler alert: he survives. Ultimately, it is this betrayal of the stakes that makes the submarine sequence one of the worst action sequences from the entire Mission: Impossible franchise, in my eyes.

Even Gabriel cannot escape physics. After flying some insane stunts to toy with Ethan (hanging off the side of his plane), Gabriel ends his unserious character arc by boasting, “Only one of us has a parachute!” He leaps from his seat — only for the air resistance to send him face-first into the tail fin of his plane. The movie cuts away from his comical death as fast as it happens, barely giving the audience time to laugh before moving on. But after calming down, we are left feeling betrayed by the literal character assassination. Ethan never gets a moral victory over his enemy. He never makes Gabriel answer for framing him for murder. Ethan hasn’t proved to the audience that he’s better; Gabriel just got cocky and unlucky. Instead, Ethan is left to contend with the real villain — physics — on a plane that’s now on fire. Luckily, he finds a parachute and makes his leap to safety, both MacGuffins in hand, only for his parachute to catch on fire too… but that’s okay! One jump cut later, it turns out that Ethan’s lucky parachute came with a backup parachute — making Gabriel’s last words all the more ridiculous.

the real superhuman intelligence was Luther Stickell

At the start of the film, Luther presents Ethan with MacGuffin B, forged from no more than 2 months of his own careful analysis: a gizmo that plugs into MacGuffin C (which they didn’t have yet), containing a computer program that is able to turn the Entity’s source code (which they didn’t have yet) into a virus that can then be uploaded to the Internet to take control of the Entity. Both the hardware and software end up working on the first try, in midair.

Anyone who has touched a programming language before knows that getting code to run correctly on the first try is the miracle work of a 10× engineer. Except this wasn’t any code; it was some kind of parser for the Entity’s source code, which is written in an unknown language — meaning that Luther had to write a universal compiler.

Also, while he was at it, Luther invented MacGuffin D, a previously-thought-impossible 5D optical storage drive with a brazillion bytes of storage, large enough to store the Entity. There was somehow a port for this in the Doomsday Vault — even though Luther could not have known that the Entity was trying to enter the Doomsday Vault until later.

Luther did all of this while being bedridden with an unspecified illness, in the tunnels of the London Underground. At peak health, he must have been more productive than all of Microsoft.

Fortunately for our suspension of disbelief, Luther’s implausible clairvoyance is brought back to reality when he commits a very human mistake — forgetting to make backups of his MacGuffins.

plot holes so big you could fire a torpedo through them

And some other things wrong with the movie:

• That’s just not how source code works.
• Like many other movies about AI, MI8 makes the mistake of treating the Entity as a singular entity. Real computer programs copy themselves as they spread, rather than moving from one machine to another. Even if it is tricked into entering MacGuffin D, the Entity has no reason to delete itself from the rest of the Internet on its way out. Why go into such exhausting detail about detonators on nukes if the most basic fact about computer networking is going to be ignored?
• Grace rigs an antenna out of some wires in an electromagnetically-isolated bunker, and it is able to receive the entire Entity (which takes up so much space that Luther invented a whole MacGuffin just to hold it) in under a minute, on the first try.
• Contrary to what the US government thinks in this movie, wiping out a country’s capital city will not stop that country from launching nukes.
• Everyone seems to be aware that the Entity is setting them up against each other, and they’re gearing up for war anyway.
• The government refuses to pull the plug on the Internet because it thinks it is more important to save “cyberspace” (a word not heard since the dot-com bust) from a tech recession than to stop the apocalypse.⁴
• The government has extremely detailed 3D models of the key that they could’ve used to make replicas this whole time.
• Not a plot hole, but the French dialogue was weak.
• The idea of sending antipode coordinates to throw Russia off the trail is not nearly as smart as the movie makes it seem — Russia has to already have some idea about where their own submarine sank, and they should be immediately suspicious that the listening station transmitted coordinates on the other side of the world.
• The Russians don’t hear Tom Cruise literally hitting the nose of their submarine.
• The Entity was created in or before 2012, because that’s when the Sevastopol sank. We’ve had 13 years of AI development since then, and nobody has achieved the same level of power — not even the people who developed the Entity.

The Final Wreckoning

The Entity does not hide that it is a caricature of modern commercial AI. I’m not the first to point out that its appearance, a sphere of blue particles, bears an uncanny resemblance to the logos of a certain set of AI companies. Even the way the Entity goes about taking over the world reflects the capabilities of modern AI — making deepfakes, blackmailing people, and spreading fake news. Anyone who knows the relationship between Hollywood creatives and generative AI knows that this is not a coincidence. However, it doesn’t help make the case that the Entity is all that superhuman after all, if it does the same stuff as your pocket GPT.

Anyhow, we’re told to believe that the world descends into widespread chaos and martial law in 2 months because of the Entity’s antics, but anyone who has had a conscious thought since 2016 knows that humans have been stooping just as low (if not lower) for years. For the movie to say that the world just goes back to normal once the Entity is under control is an insult to our own self-destructive tendencies. It comes across as wishful thinking that the forces dividing us can be personified and conquered like a regular movie villain, while in reality the force comes from within.

Is that really what Hollywood thinks of AI? If so, the writers did a poor job of making a villain out of the AI in The Final Reckoning. Their cautionary tale about the dangers of AI somehow ended up being a cautionary tale about looking behind your shoulder before jumping out of a plane. Perhaps it was also a cautionary tale about using human writers. Maybe they could use some help…