In the last few years I’ve read more scenarios than I can count spinning out a near-future world where artificial intelligence slips free of our frail mortal attempts to align it with our interests, lifts off into Skynet levels of self-interested power, and decides that it doesn’t need to keep the human race around. Some of these scenarios are vividly detailed, rich in imaginary incident. But none of them, so far as I can tell, addresses the counterpoint that the Mission: Impossible franchise poses to any vision of human obsolescence: What about Tom Cruise?
“I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.” That line belongs to William Faulkner, accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, at the dawn of the atomic age. But I choose to believe that Faulkner had been graced, through the agency of some muse or daemon, with a vision of Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning — the back half of 2023’s Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning, which together complete the eight-movie Mission: Impossible series, a three-decade-long experience of watching one very specific man not only endure but prevail.
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