One of the joys of “The Final Reckoning” (assuming you’re generally into the film and the “M:I” series) is how it’s both a payoff for the entire franchise and its own unique movie, even leaving “Dead Reckoning” aside. Ethan’s struggle against the amoral rogue AI known as The Entity expands beyond the intelligence community to become a clear and present danger to the entire world: it changes the very concepts of reality and truth within cyberspace, recruits those it radicalizes as acolytes, throws every nation into political and social chaos while edging them toward nuclear annihilation, and so on.
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After that hefty bit of alt-history world building, McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen have to bring the journey of Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) to a close, reintroduce Gabriel (Esai Morales) as a fallen Entity acolyte now working for himself, and set up the whereabouts and team status of new members Grace (Hayley Atwell), Paris (Pom Klementieff), and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis). Most crucially, they give Ethan not one but three missions to complete: President Sloane orders him to turn himself in, Gabriel demands that he retrieve and hand over the Entity’s source code, and the Entity itself insists that he bring it to a remote digital bunker (all of which are impossible, especially in conjunction with each other, and all of which Ethan manages to accomplish, of course).
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With this much material to juggle, McQuarrie realized that handling it gracefully was going to be his own impossible mission. Initially, he attempted a cut of the film which was non-linear, meaning that Ethan and President Sloane’s confrontation scene happened first, with the other material turned into flashbacks. When that didn’t work, he tried a linear cut, which also didn’t work since it didn’t properly introduce The Entity up top. Thus, he and Cruise concluded that being as forthright as possible was the way to go, as McQuarrie explained:
“That’s the big lesson for Tom and I, over and over and over again. There’s just a point where you just have to say it. Just f—ing tell ’em … And that’s why the scene where Ethan confronts The Entity, that scene contains within it everything I insisted could not be in the scene, and contains nothing that Tom insisted must be in the scene. It’s a rejection of everything we believed could or could not be, and we did it two days before we locked picture.”
The compromise for having the AI villain flat out state its threats and goals was McQuarrie, the sound team, and the film’s composers making an experiential and emotional meal out of such a nakedly expositional scene. While the filmmakers may feel it’s a step back from their initial vision for the confrontation, I believe the sequence still works as a dark mirror to the typical IMF mission briefing, which is something McQuarrie has been driving at since the opening of “Rogue Nation.”
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