Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning: could this be Ethan Hunt’s last hurrah?

Ethan Hunt’s adversary in the eighth and final (?) Mission: Impossible is AI, but his nemesis, all along, has been gravity. The first he will gladly destroy, taking the internet with it, but the other he has kept coming back to, most memorably in the ‘black vault’ at Langley in the first film and the Burj Khalifa sequence in the fourth. The Final Reckoning was originally billed as the second part of Dead Reckoning (2023) and still serves as a complementary work in the ways that matter: not the plot, but the spectacle of a man defying the laws of physics. The big moments in Dead Reckoning were on the surface: cars and trains. In Final Reckoning, by contrast, we go above and below: in a shipwrecked submarine beneath the Barents Sea, then up in the air, in a chase that takes place between ancient biplanes precisely because they haven’t been caught up in the diabolical world wide web.

A malign AI known as The Entity, spreading through the internet, is taking over the world, and Ethan and his team can only fight it by adopting offline tech. The subtext is at barely periscope depth: for AI and the internet read CGI and streaming. And AI. And the internet. The Mission: Impossible films are practical not digital, where it counts, and it is fitting that the series ends (?) with Ethan apparently unleashing Butlerian jihad – a war on technology. The choice is between that and The Entity taking control of the world’s nuclear arsenals and bringing about Apocalypse – and the religious terms are entirely apt here. The first Mission: Impossible (1996) took place in a recognisable post-Cold War Europe, but the later films play out in what the main characters call a ‘shadow’ world, and much of the dialogue is tinged with mysticism.

The other thing that Ethan defies but keeps coming back to is the lure of women. Formally, he swore off romantic entanglements after the third film, when his wife, played by Michelle Monaghan, was put in danger. Since then he has, as they say, gone his own way, but the perversity of the later films, since the advent of Rebecca Ferguson in Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015), is that he keeps finding himself alongside beautiful women who seem to stimulate feelings in him that are never articulated or acted upon, and which are indeed only on the edge of being registered on film. If they are ‘to be looked at’, it isn’t by Ethan. Final Reckoning contains what must be the most extreme example of Ethan’s qualified renunciation, at the climax of one of the series’s most powerful sequences.

Ethan is in the submarine to retrieve a USB stick containing The Entity’s source code, and he is terrifyingly alone as the flooded sub rolls towards the edge of a precipice, and as missiles and torpedoes come off their racks. If in the air, gravity and the g-forces generated by the planes’ motion vie with one another, here it is the effect of water, and the submarine’s pitching and yawing, that confound the normal movement of objects, and the sequence is truly disorienting. Ethan leaves the sub without diving suit or oxygen, and the surface is covered with ice; but, as we knew she would, Grace finds him, and he is saved – Grace the character, that is, played by Hayley Atwell, who gives him a very kissy kiss of life, wearing a vest-top though we are some distance north of the Arctic Circle. Ethan does seem aware of this, but the point is not underlined or returned to. Later on, Grace seems to be about to kiss him again, but instead, she gives him temporal power over the fate of mankind (on a different USB stick), a sign of transcendent, ethereal love – even of faith. Nothing sexual.

Is this the end? Final Reckoning has the sense of an ending, in Frank Kermode’s sense, in that, like the Bible it provides “fictive concords with origins and ends” for a series which consists of many books and, arguably, two parts, but was never planned. Most pleasingly, it brings back the guy whose drink Emmanuelle Béart spiked in the Langley sequence three decades ago, and ties things up pretty conclusively. But can it really be the end? As we hear more than once, “nothing is written”.

► Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is in UK cinemas now.