Mission: Impossible — Fallout (Review)

Mission: Impossible — Fallout (2018)

As a member of Alamo Drafthouse Cinema's Victory Rewards Program, I had the distinct privilege of being among the first audiences to see Mission: Impossible — Fallout after being invited to a pre-release Victory screening of the film. The screening came at the end of a long day full of conferences and meetings, and I walked into the theater really wishing I'd just put off the viewing until after the film's official release, at which point I could have picked a time when I was less tired to go and see it. I was pleasantly surprised to have left the theater a few hours later much more awake than when I arrived. And that was without consuming caffeine.

It should come as no surprise, though. The Mission: Impossible films have really reinvented themselves over the past few years as adrenaline-pumping blockbusters that race from one breathtaking practical stunt to the next. It is one of the last film franchises alive that sells itself on star power and star power alone. You go to Mission: Impossible movies to see what insane stunt Tom Cruise is going to film himself doing this time around, plot, setting, characters, and all the other important elements of story be damned. But the reason I left the theater quite enthused about this new M:I has less to do with watching Tom Cruise jump out of a plane than it does with—somewhat unexpectedly—the story.

The M:I films have been very good at playing out like massive-scale episodes of a weekly procedural television series. They are very old-fashioned in how they tell their stories, in how they market themselves as vehicles for the star. Limited character development in favor of plot-driven action has been the series' hallmark since Brian de Palma's original 1996 adaptation of the old television show. Every movie plays out a standalone story with very little in-universe referencing to the films that came before it. You might see a few familiar faces crop up every now and again, but for the most part every movie is a self-contained venture with new characters and new settings. Each film bears a distinct look and feel, the fingerprints of each film's respective director. It keeps things nice and clean, and you don't have to have seen the one that came before it to understand what's happening in the one you're watching. The M:I series has been a nice reprieve from the current culture of "shared universe" filmmaking, where all movies of any major film series are linked through this intricate web of interconnected characters and plots.

All that to say, Mission: Impossible — Fallout, the sixth film in the M:I series, is the first film in the series that really requires you to have seen the last film to understand what's going on. In fact, it really requires you to have seen every other film in the series to have a full appreciation for what is unfolding onscreen. And I do not mean this in the sense that Fallout incorporates little nods and homages to the previous films. What I mean is that Fallout is thematically linked to every other film in the series because it builds most every aspect of its plot and character drama, and even its action sequences, on everything that has come before. The most iconic scenes from every other M:I are repackaged and served up in Fallout, from the stellar opening sequence of de Palma's 1996 adaptation, to the black leather accented motorcycle chase of John Woo's M:I 2, to the scene where Cruise's character sprints across an entire city in M:I III, and so on. And the reason for these creative decisions on the part of writer/director Christopher McQuarrie (the first director to return to the series, after making Rogue Nation) is perfectly summed up by the film's title: Fallout.

Mission: Impossible — Fallout is a film about consequences. About dealing with all that's come before it. It is, in many ways, the Skyfall of the M:I series. The premise is simple: when three plutonium cores fall into the wrong hands, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team race against the clock to stop nuclear attacks from being carried out against the world's holy cities. But of course, the plot thickens as the movie sprints forward. The mission becomes more desperate and the situation much more dire when Hunt crosses paths with a villain from his past who, it turns out, has been haunting his dreams like a dark prophet of some coming apocalypse—Solomon Lane, the big bad of Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation. Lane comes back into the fold to exact his revenge against Hunt, and in doing so brings Hunt's past into the crosshairs of the present. He says that he is doing as much in some of the film's dialogue, suggesting the events of the film are the "fallout" of all that Hunt has done up until now.

Though the M:I films are hardly concerned with continuity, they have built for themselves an interesting mythology over the years. In his film, Brian de Palma introduced Hunt to this seedy European underworld led by Max, a sphinx of a character played by the striking Vanessa Redgrave. Max's bodyguard appeared in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, but Max comes back in a large yet unexpected way in Fallout. A character known as the White Widow turns out to be Max's daughter, and the way Vanessa Kirby delivers her lines echoes Redgrave's performance as the shady arms dealer of de Palma's film brilliantly. This is just one example of how Fallout stitches together the M:I mythology.

But the area where this storytelling tactic is strongest is easily in the realm of character drama. By bringing back Rebecca Ferguson as assassin Ilsa Faust and dropping Hunt's former wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan) in harm's way, the characters of the M:I franchise really spark in new and interesting ways. Ever since the decision to have Hunt get hitched in M:I III, but separate from his new bride sometime before the events of Ghost Protocol, Julia has lingered in the shadows of the series for the past few movies, much like she haunts the fringes of Ethan Hunt's mind. By bringing her into the finale of Fallout, McQuarrie really raises the stakes while simultaneously ensuring that Hunt finally deals with some of the emotional "fallout" of choices that were previously made offscreen, during the in-betweens of previous films. It's kind of gutsy to do this in a film series that has made its name avoiding this particular brand of continuity development, but it really works here because it reminds us that its actors are actually capable of—surprise, surprise—acting. I quipped to someone after my viewing that Tom Cruise does more acting in the final thirty minutes of Fallout than he has in the entire series (except maybe the first one).

Apart from dealing with the consequences of previous decisions, perhaps the most prominent theme of Fallout is bound up in the character of Ethan Hunt himself. One of the hallmarks of the television series (and de Palma's original adaptation) was the twisty plots and subterfuge that always had you questioning the motivations of characters who might have been allies, might have been villains. In fact, de Palma's adaptation plays out like its caught in some nightmare state rife with paranoia. Fallout taps into this unique mood of espionage fiction. At one point, when watching Fallout, I distinctly remember thinking to myself, "I have absolutely no clue what is happening or who is doing what or why." I just knew that Ethan Hunt was the only good guy on the screen, until a character in the film suggested that maybe he was actually the villain, and for some reason I started thinking, "Why not? We don't actually know that much about him."

For the first three films of the franchise, Hunt almost played like a different character in each iteration. The original positioned him as a man on fire, burned by someone on the inside and a bit driven by revenge. The second film had him as this daredevil super-spy who often took unnecessary risks. The third had him as a desperate man who just wanted to leave this espionage business behind. But it wasn't really until Ghost Protocol that the Ethan Hunt we see in Fallout really began to form—a man committed to fighting the good fight because it's the good fight. Committed to saving lives because it's the right thing to do. Jack Bauer of 24 kind of does the same thing, but Bauer's philosophy would see him kill one for the sake of saving many. Hunt is kind of like the antithesis of Jack Bauer—he will move heaven and earth to save both many and the one. If anyone is going to be sacrificed, Hunt will sacrifice himself. This, it is revealed, turns out to be the impetus behind his decision to separate from Julia earlier in the series. There is no way he could be happily married when there was someone out there who wanted to set the world afire, and no way he could keep both Julia safe with him and stop the bad guys at the same time. So he undertook the ultimate "impossible mission," if you will, and removed himself from the equation. He let Julia fade into obscurity, under a new name, a new identity, and has kept tabs on her for years when he's not out there saving the world. Of course there's a lot of pent-up emotion here, and Fallout brilliantly deals with the consequences of those choices in the end. Hunt is a good man because he is willing to sacrifice himself to save others. This is teased out in dialogue between series regular Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Ilsa.  He is unwilling to make the hard choice of sacrificing one for the sake of many, and instead makes the hardest choice of all—sacrificing of himself, in a thousand unsexy ways, each and every day. Sometimes that means he's going to have to eat his meals alone. Other times that means he's going to have to sleep with a gun close at hand. But every now and then that means he's going to have to crash one helicopter into another helicopter to retrieve a remote detonator from a highly-trained killer bent on destruction, in what has to be one of the most harrowing and thrilling sequences of cinema ever filmed. These really are fun movies.

And this really is good storytelling. It's making do with the obvious beats in the story that have already been supplied by series history, while altogether pushing the narrative into new and unexpected areas. There are some interesting religious beats in the story, the villains calling themselves "The Apostles" and the targeting of specific holy cities. Religious motivations are the name of the game in Fallout. This film's primary villain, a mysterious man initially known only as John Lark, has messianic aspirations and delusions concerning world peace, which are juxtaposed against Hunt's virtuous character. In a way, the M:I films have always been on the cutting edge of politics and real-world happenings, all of these little details just end up being lost in the shuffle of a fast-moving narrative. In this instance, linking religious ideologies with convictions toward destruction firmly plant the narrative in the here and now. But in terms of where the story and themes land on all of this, it is important to note that, with this film, the series has effectively stated its overarching theme: that greater love hath none than this, that a man lay down his own life for his friends. This virtue is at the core of Hunt's character, and thus at the core of the entire franchise. There is a strong moral fiber here that one is not accustomed to finding in major movies. And that, I think, is enough to warrant a viewing of this particular summer blockbuster, whether you've seen the previous films or not.

It wouldn't surprise me if the next Mission: Impossible doesn't reinvent itself in yet another unexpected way. In some fashion, I am very content leaving Ethan Hunt's character where he ends up in Fallout. There's a lot of emotional resolution here, a kind of period at the end of a sentence that has been developing since Ghost Protocol, but manifested itself in prototypes during the first three films. I've found it helpful to think of the M:I film series, as it now stands, as two trilogies. Fallout serves as a good conclusion to the second trilogy, which has carefully shaded in its characters so that this time around, the characters have history and dimensionality. And the movie—and the film series as a whole—really is all the better for it.