We Will Not Be Saved From The Fallout

The standard line on the late career of Tom Cruise was created in the anticipation and wake of Mission Impossible -- Fallout: that he will move heaven and earth, and himself, marshal the whole industrial apparatus of film production, to entertain, and through that entertainment, to keep alive a certain idea of himself, and of the American cinema. But what is that idea?

Is it the vitality of action?

The 'reality' of stuntwork?

That a movie star, rather than a movie property, can generate feasible business?

I've seen and enjoyed Fallout several times, but it is a curious film to hang such rhetoric on. Ultimately, it is a film not consciously about any of these things, not about Cruise being a so-called 'savior of cinema' -- all of that was attached to him by people, critics and fans, who in the late 2010s were seeing the homogenization of Hollywood into an IP delivery machine and wanted a messiah-figure who stood against all of this. And Cruise, having devoted himself to hanging on the outside of planes and climbing the tallest buildings, was a prime candidate for the mantle: big movies, but made with personality, made with care, with intention.

Later, Cruise and his partner Christopher McQuarrie were to internalize a lot of this rhetoric. In The Final Reckoning, we see Ethan Hunt as the sole lynchpin, the only ghost in the vast machinery of the world's nuclear and digital arsenals, but even then, the film does not sacrifice him, he lives to accept another mission.

For a while, I myself bought into all of this: that Cruise, despite his role in the malignant organization of Scientology, was overall a net-good for filmmaking. And today, I do not fully repudiate that, either -- but I no longer place him at the center of the movie cosmos in the way that was fashionable from 2018-2023. Maybe he was the messiah of that moment, of the many billions made by Disney corporation and then the subsequent COVID-induced crash, the hobbled theater business afterwards, Project Popcorn -- Cruise did come to represent something during that zeitgeist, a single willingness to sustain a business model that was rapidly changing, and now, has changed.

To write about all of this is a bit in bad taste, like speaking about a love you had in high school -- Cruise hasn't gone anywhere, and likely will never retire. What's more embarrassing is that I think it revealed the quiet despair hidden inside cinephile circles, that nothing would ever be the same, the Faustian desire to hold on to a certain paradigm that one had grown accustomed to, to deny history, that a single film like Fallout could reverse trends that were decades in development, that art could triumph over money -- well, Fallout was very successful at the box office, if we care about that sort of thing, and we're still here where we are today.

Much has been inveighed about Cruise, the Mission Impossible project, what it means for filmmaking writ large, but I don't think I've ever stopped to ask what do these films actually mean for those who watch them? When you talk about Mission Impossible -- Fallout, do you talk about yourself? Are we delighted by these films, or are we moved by them? Both? What do they say about the human experience?

Well, inasmuch as art 'communicates' anything, Fallout features the fake bombing of three holy cities, rogue anarchist intelligence agents, nukes in the wind, a smallpox outbreak in Kashmir -- but none of this really matters to the film or the filmmakers. When you watch a spy film made during the Cold War, like Martin Ritt's The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, the best case is that the film reveals the political attitudes of its era, their complexities and failings, it uses spycraft as a lens in which to signify what state power means in a world divided by ideological & economic conflict. With Fallout, what conclusions can we draw? That chaos is here, and that only Ethan Hunt can contain it, whisking the nuclear genie back in the bottle time and again with the help of his loyal friends. Is the film 'about' the anarchist ideology of the Apostles, of whom we only really encounter Henry Cavil's character, who has little to say besides standard badguy speak? "The greater the suffering, the greater the peace" -- it is the sort of world-hating nihilism spewed by a Final Fantasy villain. The film obviously rejects this thinking, but then it isn't either about conflict in Kasmir, or Mecca, Jerusalem and Rome, or the danger of nuclear proliferation -- all of it serves a larger 'geopolitical' aesthetic, deprived of context and swirled into a soup of cliches that carries an adult sensibility to buoy the PG-13 rating.

Chris McQuarrie has spoken in several interviews about how these movies are essentially made 'for children', and for international audiences, just like the James Bond films present this image of adolescent jet-setting -- the sun set on the British Empire in reality, but inside the filmic landscape, all of the world remains colonized as a colorful backdrop for Bond's romps and seductions. The Mission Impossible films are clearly a variant on this, but reflect a projected anxiety that America has about its own power and where and when it's deployed. As the series goes on, the IMF becomes less and less of a 'real' organization with offices and clerical workers, and instead seems more like a terrorist cell lead by a charismatic leader and his devout followers -- that Ethan Hunt and his team are identical to Solomon Lane and the Syndicate/Apostles is something that McQuarrie must have been aware of. The IMF is itself a 'rogue nation', not accountable to anyone but to Hunt, occasionally at the hire of the US government, and rival to the CIA as we see in Fallout.

The IMF are cowboys, whose anti-systemic nature allows them to better serve the larger system of world governance -- like the A-Team, they are the last resort for those who have no other recourse, and the later Mission films are full of begrudging bureaucrats who hate Ethan Hunt and what he represents, but nevertheless have to prostrate themselves to his skill and authority. If The Final Reckoning has the AI Entity as an 'Anti-God', then Hunt & the IMF are angelic servitors who, while forever outside of man's understanding and control, swoop-in on occasion to deliver divine justice whenever it is most needed.

McQuarrie has strongly developed this theme in his half of the series, to the point where I believe it is the only larger theme that these movies have ever had -- that America's vision of how the world is 'supposed to be' depends on the whims of a few figures & elements it cannot claim authority over. What this means in reality: the nuclear umbrella, while created as a concept by the USA, is something it no longer has a choice in: if America wishes to remain a world power, it is wedded to the potential extensive deployment of nuclear weapons. Another uncontrollable force is the individualist-populist ideology of the country, that someone with enough sway over the hearts and minds of key citizens is afforded immense power to enforce their will, and that any checks & balances must give way to the 'freedom' of this person. And finally, that there is no ability for regular people to have agency over their own lives via democratic means -- a 'terrorist' or 'anarchist' with ingenuity will always bypass the slow deliberation of voting and potentially destabilize the whole system, so what is needed is a flexibly non-democratic organization to strike against those whose unapproved 'excess' might threaten the status quo.

Fallout is a Manichean story which abides by these lines of thought: Ethan Hunt's extra-governmental organization is 'good', Solomon Lane/John Lark's Syndicate/Apostles is 'bad', not because they're functionally different, but because one is an inoculated virus and the other seeks to turn over the apple cart. Ethan Hunt's network of spies are personable and humanist, while the Apostles are cloaked in darkness. Yet there are remnants of what the film was originally conceived of by McQuarrie, where Hunt's cosplay as John Lark would have him commit crimes and violate his personal code as he went further undercover for the sake of the mission. You can hear McQ talk about this on the commentary and in interviews, a road not taken, likely because that sort of story doesn't fit inside the parameters of the Tom Cruise branding, that it's 'not Mission'. But the tension remains a speculative possibility: Hunt, with his self-righteous view that 'the best hands are always our own', would of course compromise himself morally if he felt it was necessary. The guy doesn't care about his own life, he's been imprisoned before in Russia, killed his own mentor, and goes 'rogue' at the drop of a hat -- logically, he would inevitably become a Solomon Lane-esque terrorist, and it is only screenwriter and nationalist fiat that he remains mostly aligned with the US government.

From that perspective, we see a more mercenary & self-interested side of Cruise & the Mission films that has nothing to do with 'saving cinema' via popcorn munching in IMAX screenings -- that these are works made at the behest of a system that does not know its best interests, that every Mission is an attempt to reset the way things 'should be' in Hollywood, just like Ethan saving the world from itself again and again. In Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning, it's pretty explicit text that Cruise is trying to wrench filmmaking away from the hands of an all-consuming AI mediasphere, to cleave 'art' from 'technology' -- but, of course, cinema itself was once a new technology before it became the 'seventh art'.

In this sense, Cruise as a figure serves the continuing degradation of this artform insofar as he is the what immunizes a certain type of Hollywood blockbuster from being considered completely aesthetically worthless -- as bad as things get with superhero films and videogame films, you're always going to be able to point at Tom Cruise and say 'well, they still make 'em like they used to!', even though on an industrial scale and in terms of movies made and released that is simply no longer the case. After the death of the Fordist studio system assembly line in the 1960s, the new neoliberal paradigm was that movies were made at less centralized volume, with higher individual scale: instead of putting out 30-40 films of various types like in the Golden Age of Hollywood, a couple big budgets, a few dozen mid-range films, and several programmers/series, the model was then switched in the 70s to putting more money in safer bets for bigger returns on investment. What that meant was that nostalgia was king, intellectual property was king, and innovation was only allowed as long as it towed the aesthetic boundaries of what already came before.

Cruise is a figure caught between that moment, and the new streaming system: now movies are equated with YouTube videos, Tiktok clips, Instagram reels, and Twitch streams. What matters is not the big individual investment, but the aural background of a 24/7 content stream where you can place advertisements every five minutes and ensure that the viewer is hooked into a larger network of consumption: they don't just buy a ticket to the movie, they're inhabiting a digital environment that demands their interaction via comments, online purchases, and reaction videos.

So Ethan Hunt tries to save the system from its own worst tendencies -- he becomes a Solomon Lane to then stop the real one, he puts himself into the Entity AI box to destroy it, he makes 'practical' movies so that movies remain analog experiences, it is all very Wagnerian. But what happens is not that he subverts or replaces the system, but that the system finds a box to put him in: the Mission Impossible films, along with John Wick pictures, Scott Adkins films, those are permitted to be the self-consciously 'retro' option for consumers to pick from. Meanwhile, the larger interface has already absorbed it and its rivals, streaming slop pops up as a tile right next to the auteurist masterwork, sports broadcasts queue right after you watch an indie drama, it all runs up against each other with little distinction between what is good or bad, analog or digital, Cruise or crap -- God made man, and the internet made him into 'content'.

So I look over to my shelf at my Blu-Ray copy of Mission Impossible -- Fallout, and it sits next to several other films alphabetically sorted -- this is my personal library, what I use instead of streaming. Here, the film matters: on my projector, it is loud and beautiful and occasionally breathtaking, especially in the helicopter chase at the end. But the battle is already lost: most people going forward will not see it as Cruise & McQ intended, or the way most filmmakers throughout the 20th century intended.

Fallout kept Hollywood kicking long enough to see Skydance, the production company behind it, eventually swallow Paramount Pictures -- now David Ellison is seeking to buy Warner Brothers and absorb it into his new empire, supposedly with the help of Saudi financial backing. And if it isn't him that buys it, it will be Netflix, Comcast, or some godawful private equity company -- what does Fallout mean then? What will it mean when Cruise is no longer able to make these films? What will it mean when a new generation watches Fallout in the 2090s, who have perhaps never seen a film in a theater, much less a Tom Cruise film? Will they even be able to see it? Or will it be lost in the shuffle of a gamut of AI-assisted 'content', where any kid can ask a chatbot to make a new Mission Impossible-esque movie?

I don't buy that last part -- even if so, it wouldn't mean anything, it would simply be an iteration of a toy. But a movie like Fallout does have the toyetic quality of almost all blockbusters, dolls crashing into one another in motorcycle chases and skydives. Does it matter that Cruise actually did those things himself? And what of the industry he fed into? That sooner or later, it is all something on someone's shelf, if it is to matter at all?

"We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close, and for those we'll never meet."

That is the IMF oath, but it is also the oath of filmmakers, and artists in general, who will never get to experience the full breadth of what their labor means to the world and to history. In retrospect, most human beings look more vulnerable and sympathetic than they might have while living -- that Cruise did put himself at risk while making these films might place him right next to Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan on the broader shelf of filmmaking. I am still left with the question of why does he do this, and why do we care? Because it affirms our humanity, that this flawed man sprained his ankle for our delight? Or is that sadism? And it still being an image, it seems equally fantastic to the unreal fancies of Georges Méliès -- how real it is depends on us, what we're willing to give it.

For a lot of film fans, Cruise became symbolic of a noble tendency. For others, he is just another side of the coin in the deep rot of Hollywood. But everyone lives and dies in the shadows, not just secret agents. What we do with that fact is the beauty we make, the sensation and the passion, the terror. And the fallout -- what is left after we are gone, the ashes that others sift through, the remnants and artefacts -- that belongs to others, that's their journey. Cruise was never going to 'save cinema', not with Mission, not with Top Gun, not with anything. He incarnated himself as the dream of a movie star in an era when movie stars no longer mean anything. Despite his prowess and talents, there is something very frail about him, as if he might shatter if he spent too long in a room by himself. The strange truth is that it was probably easier for him to do these insane stunts than it is to stop and consider what those stunts actually mean in-themselves -- the fictional nature of his persona, of American cinema, and of America herself, they might all blow away in a strong enough breeze, soft radiation on solar winds, a speck of sun in the screening room of the galaxy.

Too close for comfort, never close enough to touch -- a sufficient definition of cinema. That's why he runs: to close the distance.