Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025)

A review full of spoilers, although if you haven't seen the film none of the spoilers will make any sense

So: an angry god, called the Entity (ens absolutum), has inhabited humanity’s internet. Having observed how wicked we have become via this, we can be honest, unflattering lens, the Entity has decided to destroy us, as Yahweh destroyed humankind with Noah’s flood—a reference specifically made in the movie. The Entity will actualise this inundatio nova via our nuclear weapons. The earthly president, in a cavernous war room, watches in alarm as a giant display screen shows the progress of the Entity’s infiltration and control of all the world’s nuclear arsenals: when it has control of them all, it will end the world. Why it needs to control absolutely all nuclear missiles, when a much smaller portion of them would do the job just as well, isn’t disclosed to us. Late in the movie, in this same location, an assassin tries to shoot the President with a pistol, is himself shot after a brief firefight, and, disappointingly, nobody cries out ‘gentlemen, you can’t fight here! This is the war room!’

Anyway: the Entity-God has an archangel called Gabriel who manifests in the human realm, but this messenger has fallen from divine favour and now is in rebellion against divine authority. Gabriel plots satanically to control God via a magic device called the ‘Poison Pill’, malware that will corrupt and subordinate the Entity once it is united with the Entity’s ‘core drive’, located at the bottom of the ocean inside a sunken Russian submarine. But here our hero intervenes. He is a human being, but possessed of supernatural powers: one who takes on all the sins of the world and is—again, the movie not once but several times makes this specific point—responsible for us all, those he knows and those he has never seen. In the course of the story he sacrifices himself. He dies upon the application of a cruciform key, descends to the (sub-marine) lower depths, harrows this hellish location, and then—dies in agony. But he is revived: resurrected by an individual literally called Grace. This human saviour is the principle of life itself, ‘Ethan’ (a Biblical Hebrew name אֵיתָן ʾêṯān meaning “firmness, strong, long-lived”) ‘Hunt’, for hunter, like Nimrod (significantly: Noah’s grandson) a mighty hunter before the lord—but actually, of course, he is Christ, the (Tom) Cruciform saviour of all mankind. The Entity is the angry God of the Old Testament, called ‘the anti-God’ in the movie, but actually the Hegelian thesis God, against which the antithesis of the ‘impossibility’ of missionary engagement—Tom’s evangelising for his work, recruiting a variety of disciples and his cruciform sacrifice—will result in the synthesis New Testament God of love and forgiveness with which the movie’s final monologue, fittingly a voice-over by a dead character, concludes the drama. The Entity is trapped inside a magic crystal, a prop which fully six hours of previous filmic storytelling, set-up, exposition and foreshadowing had somehow entirely omitted to mention until the very end of this flick—but there it is, glowing like the shining golden whatever-it-was in the briefcase in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. The Entity ends the film trapped in this crystal, making it the Crystalline Entity, and so presumably setting up a Mission: Impossible/Star Trek: the Next Generation crossover event at some point in the future. On this happy possibility I conclude my review.