Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One Discussion
Looking at the history of the franchise to put Ilsa, Grace, and Gabriel into context
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the Mission:Impossible series discussed here wouldn’t exist.
*Contains spoilers for all seven Mission: Impossible films, including Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One*
I have now seen Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (henceforth Dead Reckoning) two times in IMAX, and I am in awe with what they were able to accomplish. It is clear that this is one of our best and most reliable action franchises. After seven entries there still has not been a bad Mission: Impossible film.
And while I love so much about Dead Reckoning, I do have some complicated feelings about it that I think requires some brief background of the franchise’s history.
A Brief Look Back
The Mission:Impossible series is a case study in how different creative voices impact the final result. The first four entries in the series are so distinct that they are barely recognizable as the same franchise. Cruise’s Hunt seems to have a different personality in each of the first four films. The IMF itself as an organization, as well as its relationship to the larger intelligence apparatus also seems to shift in each entry. Compare, for example, the larger scope of the organization in Abrams’s entry (large office building, considerable support staff and Ethan Hunt training a new generation of agents) to the more paired back IMF in entries before and since.
This is a series with very little continuity for the world itself, as well as its characters, with the main connective tissue for the first four entries being Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt and Ving Rhames as Luther Stickell.
And then Christopher McQuarrie came along.
McQuarrie and Cruise are frequent collaborators. McQuarrie has written and directed three Mission: Impossible films now (Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, Mission: Impossible - Fallout, and Dead Reckoning, with another on the way), while also directing Cruise in Jack Reacher. He also helped to write and/or produce Valykyrie, Edge of Tomorrow, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, The Mummy, and Top Gun: Maverick.
But his influence on the Mission franchise really starts with Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (henceforth Ghost Protocol), where he did an uncredited rewrite, and here is where I think we see the start of someone trying to tie all of the threads of the previous films together. Several references from the third film are weaved throughout Ghost Protocol, whether it’s bringing back Simon Pegg’s Benji, or tying the backstory of Jeremy Renner’s character to Hunt’s wife, this feels like the first time that we see the current film actually building upon threads from previous entries, even if it isn’t a lot.
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (henceforth Rogue Nation) is McQuarrie’s first chance to fully write and direct, and he delivers one of the best entries in the entire series. It’s a curious mix of preserving the past (Luther, Benji, and Brandt), while also introducing new characters and elements that capture his fascination and interest, such as The Syndicate, Sean Harris as Solomon Lane, Alec Baldwin as Alan Hunley, and of course the brilliant Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust.
Rogue Nation ups the ante in virtually every category, stunts, the difficulty of the mission, the villain, all while adding Ilsa, one of the most compelling characters of the whole franchise, whose competency and chemistry with Ethan provides a perfect foil. And yet, it wasn’t possible to move forward with that relationship because of the baggage of the previous films. Ethan Hunt is a married man, remember?
While each new Mission seemed to shed the baggage of previous installments, that wasn’t entirely possible for the audience. Which brings us to Mission: Impossible - Fallout (henceforth Fallout).
Fallout - The First Real Mission: Impossible Sequel
While Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation both bring back characters and elements from previous installments, Fallout to me is the first real sequel of the entire franchise. It is the first film where the central story develops because of characters and events from previous films. McQuarrie describes some of this development process for Fallout:
“Day one. First thing I said to Tom, 'What do you want to do? If you can do one thing in this movie?' And he said, 'People are still asking me about Julia, and I want to give that story closure.' And I said, 'We can do it, but it can't be a detour in the movie.' Like, you know, after the opening of the movie he goes to see Julia, and they have like a ... that'll just get cut out of the film, I've made a Mission already, and knew what survived. Every scene in a Mission movie has to fight for its right to be there…. So I said, we gotta bake it in, and as such, here's how the movie opens, and here's how the movie closes, and the end, there must then be a scene somewhere in the movie where Luther tells the story to Ilsa, because you've got to reintroduce the idea of Julia. So Julia's story was the very first conversation we had, and it was the backbone of the movie.”1
But it’s not just Julia. Fallout is the first film to bring back a villain. Sean Harris as Solomon Lane returns in Fallout, building on the conflict and tension created in Rogue Nation. And perhaps most importantly, we have the character development of Ilsa Faust, as well as her deepening bond to Ethan.
Every previous Mission: Impossible film has had incredible female leads, and none of them have come back for a main role except for Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust. For the first time in the franchise, we not only had a female character return, but she played a central role in the action of the film. In a franchise that has unceremoniously rid itself of its female characters, this felt like a fresh new direction. Fallout gracefully resolves Julia’s story, while clearing the decks for further development between Ethan and Ilsa, suggesting closeness and intimacy in the final shots of the film.
Which brings us to Dead Reckoning.
The Ilsa and Grace of it All
They kill Ilsa twice.
Once in a fake out early in the film, and then much more definitively later on. Dead Reckoning seems self aware about the history of its female characters, even going so far as to making it an explicit part of the text (Esai Morales’s speech to Hayley Atwell in the club sequence), but that didn’t change the impact for me. I still feel conflicted.
At the end of Fallout it felt like there was exciting potential for Ethan and Ilsa’s relationship, whether romantic, or as teammates in a professional capacity. Yet, Dead Reckoning starts with us learning that Ilsa is again acting of her own accord, apart from Ethan and his team. It felt like a character reset that didn’t fully honor all of the development we saw in Fallout. I think I can buy in to the version of the character we get in Dead Reckoning (Kitteridge talking about the pattern of Ilsa going off and then Ethan bailing her out), but that is offscreen development between films that doesn’t fully square with my understanding of where things were left in the previous movie. Whether one decides that it is ultimately consistent with the character of Ilsa, it still requires a reliance on character exposition about what happened between films, instead of what I personally observed in the last film.
Ilsa gets precious little to do in Dead Reckoning, which feels like a waste, although Ferguson makes the most of every single moment and look. We have now seen her skill and competency across two films as an equal to Hunt, and yet she is quickly dispatched by Gabriel.
All of this created an internal storm of conflict as I watched Hayley Atwell give a stunning performance as Grace, displaying incredible chemistry with Cruise that was only previously matched by Ferguson in Rogue Nation.
I love Atwell’s character, and yet I am uncomfortable with the movie sacrificing Ilsa in order to give that space to Grace. Again, the movie is smartly engaging with the meta narrative inside the story itself (Ilsa sacrificed herself to save Grace, and Grace similarly does not feel good about the trade), but that small sense of disappointment in Ilsa’s treatment and fate remains.
It was easier my second time through the film, knowing and perhaps making peace with Ilsa’s fate allowed me to more fully invest in Grace as a character. She is incredible in the film, and her arc is compelling, but I wonder what we lost in starting again from scratch instead of building on what came before.
Which leads to my thoughts on Esai Morales’s Gabriel, and my final criticism of the film.
Show Don’t Tell
Fallout is a masterclass in compelling antagonists, and they do it in two ways.
First we have Solomon Lane, returning from the previous film. We take all of the resentment and history of the events of Rogue Nation and put them on the board for Fallout. We know this character. I saw and experienced the first conflict between Lane and Hunt, and so I was emotionally invested in this rematch. The film is dealing with consequences (”The fallout of all your good intentions”) and organically builds on what came before.
Henry Cavill’s August Walker doesn’t have the benefit of an introduction in a previous film, but they also smartly spend the entire first half of the film developing the dynamic between him and Ethan. Walker isn’t a faceless villain that we see for two or three scenes at crucial moments, rather he is introduced almost at the very beginning, and while he starts working alongside Hunt, their conflict and tension is immediate. We see their relationship develop onscreen as Walker rips out Ethan’s air tube before the Halo jump, or their difficulty working together in the Paris nightclub. There is a consistent back and forth that we get to witness as their dynamic develops, as we slowly learn that Walker has authorization to put them down in his capacity as a CIA agent, and then shifts again as we learn that Walker is actually the villainous John Lark.
The animosity between these characters in their final confrontation is earned and felt by the audience, because we saw every step along the way.
With Gabriel we get a flashback and some exposition.
We aren’t shown in the film the great conflict between Gabriel and Ethan, and we don’t have anything in previous films to latch onto either. Instead we are briefly shown a flashback referencing a backstory that has never been brought up in the six previous films, even though it was apparently a crucial piece of Ethan’s development (”In a very real sense, he made me who I am today”).
No, he didn’t. We’ve literally never heard of this guy or the woman he killed. It’s never been alluded to, mentioned, or hinted at in the previous six (!) films.
Instead we are told how much conflict there is between the two. We are told how much animosity Ethan has towards Gabriel. We are told what a bad guy he is, but we see very little of it for ourselves (the exception being the killing of Ilsa Faust, which is complicated by what I wrote above).
While I found so much about Gabriel and the Entity compelling in the film, ultimately I felt that I was missing some emotional footing that would have allowed me to fully connect. I’m excited to see how the character and dynamic continues to develop for Dead Reckoning - Part Two.
Conclusion
I love these movies and I believe time will be kind to Dead Reckoning, especially once the story is completed in Part Two. And my criticisms aside, I think what they were able to achieve in this film is incredible.
Fallout was always going to be a hard act to follow, but they made a valiant attempt and it was glorious to watch.
Well said about the Ilsa vs Grace problem and the Ethan vs Gabriel conundrum. While I don’t think the previous films could have planned for this Ethan backstory/motivation for joining IMF, I feel like they could have pulled off a spider man far from home trick where they ever so slightly retcon an event from one of the previous movies. Dunno, could have worked just as bad or better but I doubt it would have been worse than what we got.