Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I (what a title!) showed up on Netflix today so I finally watched it and, wow, did this past observation on the trajectory of MI and Brosnan/Craig-era Bond really become a dark prophecy
I really felt like, if that is where they wanted to go with this, they needed to do more than just a few half-assed flashback retcon stuff, or at least not hold so much back for the Part 2. Esai Morales is fine as the villain, but really does not have enough personality to be both the human agent of a rogue AI as well as some kind of evil spectre from Hunt’s never-before-alluded-to pre-IMF past. In movies like this in particular I really don’t buy it when any antagonist’s motivations are just “he is obsessed with being wicked and doing crimes… and is particularly obsessed with ending the world and also most of all killing the main character…”
Like, one fairly obvious direction to go with this is that Gabriel is not actually the guy Hunt thinks he is, whoever that is, but has just been made to look like that by the rogue AI to unnerve him, but I feel like that’s not a dramatic enough reveal to save for part 2 so maybe they aren’t doing it
Anyway I didn’t mean to get so deep into the Lore here, posting about it mainly to say how much I appreciate a movie that can have the lines “Whoever controls the Entity controls the Truth”
Anytime anyone says anything about The Entity I got super hyped, but other than that they did this gimmick in this movie maybe 2-3 to many times, where like the characters finish each other’s sentences but it’s just more exposition/plot dump stuff. Like I’m sorry a million dutch angles and distributing the dialogue among 3 different characters does not make that stuff any more interesting. I also thought it was funny that they would have a few minutes of rants about The Entity that feel like they could have been ripped from some kind of critical theory reader on cybernetics or simulacra something and then a very obviously inserted pull back down to earth, like “The entity now controls the outward manifestation of reality, but reality itself establishes the preconditions for the entity’s manifestation…So that means we need to steal the key from this man in the airport?”
The movie works best when it feels like watching a Buster Keaton movie while listening to like Marshall McLuhan weiner audiobooks. I had a literary theory prof who was like obsessed with Terminator 3 for this kind of reason, and I feel like this is probably his new favorite movie ever made