Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Sunday morning, Sharon and I went to see Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning at the Country Club Cinema. This is the eighth installment of the series. Sharon and I saw Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning [#7] in March 2024. Sharon, Jack and I saw Mission: Impossible - Fallout [#6] in 2018, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation [#5] in Boston in 2015 during our east coast college tour and Mission Impossible III in 2012.

Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning is a 2025 American spy action film directed by Christopher McQuarrie from a screenplay he co-wrote with Erik Jendresen. It was released May 23, 2025. It is a direct sequel to the previous installment that also wraps up continuous threads begun in the 1996 original.

It stars Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt. Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny, and Angela Bassett reprise their roles from the previous films.

In the film, Hunt and his IMF team face off against "the Entity", a powerful rogue AI.

As a kid, I loved watching the old television series. The theme song for the series is part of the soundtrack for my life.

The stunt work at the end of the movie is pretty amazing. Tom Cruise was genuinely on the wing of a vintage biplane as it flew at speeds of up to 140 miles per hour and at altitudes of around 8,000 feet. There was no green screen for the bulk of the stunt. No body doubles were used for Cruise's actions. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the creation of a new "Best Stunt Design" category. Unfortunately, it will not debut until the 100th Academy Awards in 2028, honoring films released in 2027.

We enjoyed the movie. As I said after the Dead Reckoning, I have a kink about an artificial intelligence's ability to hack any and all systems. With almost 45 years of large system information technology experience, the casualness with which some extremely complicated technical things are accomplished grates on me. I appreciate the concern about artificial intelligence, but technology on this kind of scale is fragile... It will be interesting to see if this is actually the final installment in the Mission: Impossible film series.