Mission Impossible 7: Rise of the Anti-Deus Ex Machina

By John Kirk

Rating: B+

Deus ex machina is a literary device that usually involves some sort of unpredictable way in which a hero of a story somehow gets rescued or accomplishes a task. Think the transporter from Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry needed a way to get the crew off the Enterprise, so he came up with the transporter.

This is important. I’ll talk about it more later.

Mission :Impossible - Dead Reckoning is the seventh iteration of this franchise that has come a long way from its 1960s TV incarnation. Hyperbolically heralded as the IMF Team’s “most dangerous mission yet,” there’s a bit of misdirection in this nearly three-hour epic beast of a film that becomes instantly apparent in its opening scenes. The weapon isn’t the goal. It’s the enemy.

The opening: we see a Russian nuclear attack submarine managing to stealthily evade sensors under the icecap of the Arctic Ocean while listening to the log of its captain who smugly declares that they are completely undetectable.

His smugness disappears when, suddenly, the electronic equipment on the sub detects a U.S. Navy sub moving into attack position. The submarine’s crew go to action stations and launch a torpedo at it, only to discover that their computer has been feeding them false information. The torpedo turns back on its own vessel, instantly destroying it.

Before the sub sinks to the bottom, we see an image of a computer-generated fractal ring, and the audience immediately knows that the computer has a mind of its own.

Do you remember War Games from 1983?

One of my favourite movies of all time, it pioneered and popularized the idea that Artificial Intelligence is a power that is beyond humanity’s control. It captured the trend of the rise of personal computers in the home and showed that leaving decisions to machines can only end in disaster. In the end, humanity should be able to make its own decisions about its future.

There’s a similar theme in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. After all, even the subtitle — a nautical term that refers to the determination of a ship’s position or distance made without the use of any sort of device — is a dead giveaway.

Essentially, it’s a guess or a computation made by a person’s judgement. With AI as the enemy (hereafter referred to as the “Entity” in the film), how do you defeat an enemy with the predictive capacity to play out millions of calculated simulations in a second? However, unlike the simplistic, Radio Shack TRS-80 computer that powered the Pentagon in War Games, the Entity seems to understand the futility of a balance of power and has decided it wants to be in charge.

That’s why Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF Team of Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) have decided that, unlike the various governments of the world who seek to control it, it’s best that it be destroyed.

With the help of master thief Grace (Hayley Atwell), the team embarks upon recovering a key that can take them to the Entity’s source code, the only way to destroy it. The problem they face though, is that not only can the Entity infiltrate all of their communications and electronics, it has even somehow enlisted the help of its own human agents, Gabriel (Esai Morales) and Paris (Pom Klementieff) who, for some unknown reason, seem to think helping this god-computer is a good thing?

That brings us to deus ex machina. Literally translated as “the god out of the machine,” there’s very little of this literary device on the side of the good guys in this film. I mean, all the tricks and tools the IMF team employ are either completely explainable or expected, given what we’ve seen them do in the previous films.

Benji and Luther are genius hackers and electronic whizzes, and Ethan Hunt is a master spy with all sorts of special-ops training at his disposal. We’ve seen them demonstrate these skills before and we fully expect to be wowed by them in this one. But, in comparison, they’re just cheap tricks in comparison to that it seems all of the Deus is all under the control of the machina in this film.

That could explain why the film is so long. Against such an over-powered threat, it takes forever for our heroes to untangle themselves from the predicament the Entity has placed them in. Anything they can think of, the Entity has already countered and even managed to predict what they’re about to do next. Including mimicking their voices, the Entity can do anything.

It’s an anti-deus ex machina situation.

Of course, there are other reasons for why this movie is such a behemoth. I’d recommend seeing the film in IMAX format, if you can. The stunts are simply breathtaking, and the car chase sequences could put the works of Steve McQueen and Gene Hackman to shame.

You’ll be amazed at what a little, yellow Fiat 500 can do. It’s also possessed of stunning scenery, with vast, panoramic settings in the Austrian mountains, sophisticated nightlife in Italy, and the opening underwater submarine sequences is amazing. But, a little bit of editing goes a long way.

Still, the Entity has to seem unbeatable, right? That’s the reason for the incredibly long run-time, and the reason for the build-up to the sequel that we won’t be able to see until next year. Who knows? Maybe an act of god will allow us to see it earlier?

CLICK HERE to read Bonnie Laufer’s Q&A with Mission Impossible 7’s Henry Czerny.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Cary Elwes, Henry Czerny, Mark Gatiss and Indira Varma. In theatres July 12.