Mission: Impossible has been a prolific action franchise that has tackled numerous threats over its existence. While the franchise’s villains are nowhere near as popular as its lead Tom Cruise is, they have generally always seemed to work in the context of the films. Moreover, the chief antagonist generally plays on fears prevalent in the time that the movie is set. So when the time came for choosing a villain for Dead Reckoning, conversations between McQuarrie and Cruise led them to conclude that technology is the one threat that they haven’t really dealt with on a full-blown scale as the film’s chief conflict.
In an interview with Collider, McQuarrie explained that he likened choosing AI as a villain to the Cold War era films of the 1960s. McQuarrie wanted a villain that is prescient, whose presence in the movie would not need too much exposition or explaining to be done to audiences and, just like the Cold War era, audiences would simply get why this is a big thing to deal with.
When I presented it to Tom, I said, ‘Two or three years ago, this idea would have been too intellectual for most people.’ We would have been explaining too much of what it was and what I count on from the audience. The thing I liken it to is the Cold War. When I was growing up, the Cold War was very real, it was a very present thing. We were under the threat, we believed, of nuclear annihilation, that at any point, there could be a war between two or three nuclear superpowers. So when you went to see a Cold War movie, you didn’t need somebody to set up the threat of the Cold War, you just felt it. It was something you brought to the movie. So my conversation with Tom was, ‘What are people bringing to the movie now? They’re not bringing the Cold War, they’re not bringing the war on terror, they’re bringing something new, and what is it? What’s this anxiety?’
McQuarrie’s comments certainly bode well in light of the changing technological landscape, more so around AI. Ever since Open AI launched GPT 3.5 as ChatGPT around November and an upgraded GPT 4.0 a couple of months later, tech companies have scrambled to incorporate generative AI into their workflows. Google followed up with Bard, Adobe debuted Firefly, and image generation tools such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion took AI-generated images to whole new heights. Understandably, the rapid progress around AI has led to paranoia around such issues as loss of jobs, misinformation and copyrights around the data on which AI was trained. This in turn gives McQuarrie and Cruise as well as other filmmakers a minefield of ideas to exploit, though given the fact that these issues are more recent, it’s less likely we’ll see anything more than a passing mention to these more recent concerns.
What McQuarrie does get to mine though is the constant anxiety and fear around technological progress, a drum filmmakers have often beaten in a myriad of ways in the past. Again, McQuarrie draws comparisons to the heightened tensions during the Cold War era that could be felt and experienced by everyone watching movies on the big screen.
I felt, in the zeitgeist, this anxiety about technology and what and how technology was beginning to influence our lives, and how do we take that anxiety that the audience is bringing to the movie and give them a release? That’s really what the movie boils down to. When you go to see Top Gun in 1986, the Cold War was a very real thing. That anxiety was something you were bringing to it, and you enjoyed that movie because that movie was telling you that everything was ultimately gonna be okay. You were showing them a way out.
Just how much McQuarrie and Cruise are able to capitalize on the threat of Artificial Intelligence will become clear once Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One bows out to theaters on July 12, 2023.
