Curious to hear thoughts on the surprising (even to me!) idea that the latest Mission Impossible film points to the metacrisis. If true, this would be further evidence that the ideas around here are hooked into the Zeitgeist.
Here’s the key part of the argument for convenience:
The clearest example of this is the retrospective framing of the “Rabbit’s Foot” from Mission: Impossible III as a precursor to the AI entity. As his rival Gabriel (Esai Morales) gleefully tells him, this means that Hunt’s earlier success, powered by his usual conviction of moral heroism, unwittingly helped create the very threat he’s now trying to save the world from.
This in turn suggests that regardless of whether he finally beats the entity, true success may be no more than a chance outcome, in a world that is simply too complex for it to be possible to predict the second-order consequences of one’s actions.
This reading is bolstered by the fact that Ethan’s whole strategy in the film derives from an intense virtual mindmeld with the AI, including a visceral experience of potential nuclear annihilation (a highly creative riff on the iconic dream sequence in James Cameron’s 1991 classic, Terminator 2: Judgement Day ).
Crucially this technological merging of minds is essentially a unidirectional message from the entity, leaving us with the question of whether Ethan’s whole strategy of solitary heroism in fact plays into the Entity’s hands.
So while Hunt does appear to emerge victorious at the end of the film, there’s a strong suggestion that this is a pyrrhic victory.
By drawing together the previous films in the sequence in a final reckoning, we suddenly see a clear pattern whereby crisis routinely follows crisis - so that the only way to end the sequence of impossible missions is to recognise this very sequence as a symptom of something deeper, something that includes the methods and worldview of Hunt and the Impossible Mission Force (the abbreviation for which - IMF - also stands for the International Monetary Fund, a similarly ambitious organisation at the heart of the global capitalist system, that could also be seen as partly responsible for the catastrophes it tries to prevent).