In Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise Does What the U.S. Government Can’t
What the U.S. government can’t do, Tom Cruise can.
If there’s a lesson to be learned from the latest, and decidedly not greatest, installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise, that’s it. The president, the nation’s top military generals, the entire intelligence apparatus—they’re all powerless to stop an apocalypse-by-MacGuffin. Only Ethan Hunt, the Impossible Mission Force agent who is really just a nom de guerre for the on-screen persona of Tom Cruise, has what it takes to save the world. Forget the bloated defense budget. To protect America, what we really need to fund is more Tom Cruise.
Granted, the Mission: Impossible films are not exactly designed to impart lessons about governance and geopolitics. They are extravagant stunt spectacles, powered by the awe of watching an aging movie star appear to risk his life for our entertainment.
But when the movie opens with Cruise’s Hunt being beckoned by the American president, and then moves on to a series of sequences in which the American executive’s top advisers recommend foolish courses of action that threaten to destroy the world rather than save it—including sacrificing an American city because reasons—well, inadvertently or not, the movie ends up saying something.
And that something is: The government, the military, the elites in charge
Article from Reason.com
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