Tom Cruise Saves the World (and Hollywood) Again
Ethan Hunt vs. the Evil Screensaver
Does artificial intelligence scare you? It sure scares Ethan Hunt. And when Ethan Hunt gets scared, he runs. Really, really fast. Directly toward the thing that scares him.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has the longest title in the series and has taken up the past five years of Tom Cruise’s life. It started filming in February 2020, got upended by the Chinese Communist Party and their latest virus, and made headlines when Cruise screamed at the crew about violating COVID-19 protocols. He didn’t even wrap filming until September 2021, months after the originally scheduled release date. But by Xenu, he got it done. He shot a blockbuster action movie at multiple foreign locations in the middle of a global pandemic.
And it’s pretty damn good!
Okay, plot summary:
This time there’s an AI, known for plot purposes as the Entity1, that looks like a glowing blue screensaver and can do basically anything. It’s sentient, it can take over any computer system it infiltrates, it knows everything about everybody in the world, it can erase a person from surveillance cameras in real time, and it can instantly calculate every conceivable outcome of every conceivable action its human opponents could ever take. It’s basically the world’s deadliest chessbot.
And it seems to carry a grudge against Ethan Hunt.
Probably after seeing Mission: Impossible 2.