this movie was dogshit and everyone who says otherwise is a stooge. “oh the action is so good, it’s just innocent fun, the power of cinema blahblah.” bro, you are mainlining the ideology of the most evil empire that has ever reigned. this movie is satanic, and if you are able to forget that and enjoy the drum machines and constant golden hour footage then you are just marching along to the imperial drum.
tom cruise is a deeply sinister cultural figure. the mission: impossible franchise can be fun, because the superspy premise is pretty fantastical and there is blissfully no attempt to develop that character; but seeing him in this film, literally wearing his Sea Org outfit, spouting platitudes stolen from yoda, saluting LRH proxies—it’s all deeply creepy. i am as confounded that he is able to pull the wool over so many eyes as when he blew a gasket because some gaffer’s mask slipped below their nose back at the beginning of the pandemic. that audio gave me PTSD flashbacks. knowing what goes on inside the church of scientology, it is so clear that his unfazed, unflinching confidence is the result of decades of psychological torture (“auditing”). imagine the scene in taxi driver where travis holds his fist over the flame to harden himself, except it’s people screaming at you for hours straight, inches from your face, and if you flinch you get put back in the hole. this is quite literally the cat-o-nine-tails that tom cruise self-flagellates with; and being such an honoured member of the church, there is no doubt that he has an unlimited supply of new trainees to abuse. he is not a “movie star,” he is a “traumatized, hollowed-out shell of a person.”
when tom cruise crash lands among the hoi polloi, the film treats him as a martian; when he is seen “socializing” at a bar, he is on the outside, looking in with his blank and uncanny stare. it’s because he is a freak, he is not a human being; if his mind were a landscape, it would be a burnt cinder. tom cruise has never had a “normal” interaction with anyone in his life. this film’s great failing, where Mission: Impossible knows its limits, is in challenging him to play a character with depth (i.e. relationships to others that are not purely hierarchical).
the real ideological core of this film is less related to the militarism and apolitical conflict at the centre of the narrative: it’s the individualism that feeds back into ideas of the amerikkkan dream. everyone has the potential to be a hero: the onus is on the individual to secure the motherland, as well as their own personal liberty. if you are not free, it’s your fault; if your country is not secure, it’s your fault. and if your country is secure, or if you are free, it is not by the grace of the social fabric, which an individual might presume to share in—no, it is because of some individual hero off somewhere who has single-handedly managed to solve whatever threatened the nation. the real poison of this film is more to do with the extreme individualist themes that saturate every layer of the narrative and its characters, and less so with the fighter jets and the occlusion of political conflict. yes this individualism is present in the story about the military, but as people are so fond of pointing out, this film is also self-reflective about the Top Gun legacy, as well as the status of its star. the cultural side of the ideology of individual exceptionalism is half of the coin, where the other half is the literal war machine: the fighter jets, the bombs, the naval air carriers, etc.
fuck this movie, fuck tom cruise, fuck the united states.