A.I. sucks, just ask Tom Cruise
In the new Mission: Impossible, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt saves the world from an algorithm
A.I. is the new corporate trend. Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson are shilling for it on Super Bowl Sunday. Tech giants like Meta and Google are infusing products with it. If you need customer support, you’re likely talking to an incredibly dumbed down version of it.
Cynics are met with a response of word salad that would make Dilbert blush. But it seems like a lot of major cultural figures are cynics, including Tom Cruise.
Cruise’s latest movie is the eighth entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise with the subtitle, The Final Reckoning. Already a global hit, this mission coupled with the seventh Dead Reckoning: Part One are stark warnings. In these possible final entries in Cruise’s most successful franchise, the Oscar-nominated star is nearly killing himself to say, “Maybe A.I. ain’t it.”
Not many people will leave the theater saying, “Wow, my mind is changed. I’m not using ChatGPT today,” least of all your colleagues on LinkedIn. No, most of Mission: Impossible’s headlines revolve around stunts like Cruise’s deep-sea diving, hanging off a plane, or motorcycling off a cliff — all of which he did, like America’s version of Jackie Chan, full of passion and Red Bull Zero.
Spectacle is Cruise’s wheelhouse. It helps us forget things like the convoluted set-ups of these Mission movies, including the repetitive first hour of The Final Reckoning. It helps us forget that, at 62 years old, Cruise can be a good actor, and he’s a Scientologist.
Personally, I don’t mind the new Mission: Impossible as much as other critics. I hope it’s the last one. It’s too long (170 mins.), but it moves. In writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, Cruise has found a formidable craftsman of popcorn movies, like Denzel Washington with director Tony Scott only Cruise and McQuarrie’s budgets are $400 million instead of $60 million. The stunts and action in Final Reckoning are impressive, as you would expect. There’s no other praise I can give other than me muttering in a crowded theater, “Holy shit.” That’s the goal of these movies.
More fascinating is the timing and what Cruise’s agent Ethan Hunt is up against. The past two chapters’ villains is “the entity” (and a distracting Esai Morales who is connected to “the entity”). Long story short, “the entity” is artificial intelligence buried deep in this submarine, and it’s taking over global cyberspace. If Hunt doesn’t do everything he can to stop “the entity,” the world blows up — missiles from every nation go flying in the air, targeting cultural landmarks and all of the sudden Hunt’s spy games have turned into a dystopian nightmare from Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
When I left the theater, I wasn’t thinking about Cruise’s stunts. I was thinking about how this guy who “saved the movies” after the pandemic with Top Gun: Maverick is out here risking his life to warn people about A.I. Do I personally know Cruise? No, but I’m aware he’s a Scientologist, and I read Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear (shit was scary). Put that together — a dude with that background who loves hanging off cliffs in his spare time is telling you that A.I. could destroy civilization. This comes decades after the science fiction of George Orwell’s 1984, the extreme violence of Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop, or the depressing Steven Spielberg/Stanley Kubrick fantasy A.I.
We didn’t listen to those guys. Will we listen to Cruise? It’s tough to hear the message when he’s jumping out of a plane, but that’s what he’s willing to do to get your attention. At this point, I don’t know if there’s anything he else can do. Maybe this final mission was impossible after all.