Tom Cruise’s latest Mission: Impossible reveals what’s at stake when using AI in film

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike has continued for more than 130 days. Hollywood writers joining the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) are protesting several issues.

Among other demands, the WGA is calling for clear rules for the use of AI in media production. Time Magazine called a “turning point” in film history.

Enter Tom Cruise and turn on The task is impossible musical theme.

Although Barbie And Oppenheimer This summer, Tom Cruise’s latest installation in The task is impossible row (Dead Reckoning, Part One), reveals more about the future of cinema.

Highlights the threat from AI

Eerily predicting the Hollywood strikes but set long before the 2020 strike, this blockbuster explores the threats of AI to human society and our political order.

Cruise’s nemesis is an artificial intelligence program called Entity. Created as a cyberweapon, the Entity gains sentience to become both agent and target in the ensuing global power competition.

Possessing computational omniscience in a digitally networked and connected world, the Entity can manipulate digital and physical infrastructure such as mobile phones and transportation systems, and thus also control people who rely on digital interfaces.

Recognizing the Entity as a fundamental threat to humanity, Impossible Mission Squad’s Ethan Hunt (Cruise) goes rogue (again) to capture and destroy the A.I.

Exciting experience

The film’s plot is a stark reminder of how little agency people have in the digital environment, even as the cinematic medium relies on modern technology to immerse its audience.

Like Cruise’s previous blockbuster in the summer of 2022, Top Shot: Maverick, Mission: Impossible: Dead Time designed to be cinema as an experience rather than a story, using drone cinematography and intricate sound editing.

Director Christopher McQuarrie explained his approach as a “completely immersive big screen experience”, incorporating high-definition video and audio technologies that allow editors to create the experience of sound in the physical environment of the audience.

Human game, star power

As a Hollywood movie star, Cruise also strives to create visceral experiences for audiences.

Even though computer graphics (CGI) and digital effects have overtaken big-budget films, Cruise insists on doing all his own stunts. He openly compared his approach to performances in classic films, stating: “Nobody asked Gene Kelly, ‘Why are you dancing?’ Why do you do your own dancing?”

Footage of him riding a motorcycle off a cliff was circulated online six months before the film’s release.

When The task is impossible released in July 2023. Cruise wowed fans at world premieres, hanging out on the red carpet and mingling with them.

His desire for a personal presence is reminiscent of the early era of Hollywood, when movie stars couldn’t rely on social media to connect with their fans. Despite his public support for the strike, he also advocated for exceptions to allow actors to promote their films.

No digital aging

Unsurprisingly, McQuarrie chose not to digitally de-age Cruise, instead focusing on the physical form of the movie star, who looks younger than his 61 years.

All Mission: Impossible: Dead Time reminiscent of the early eras of cinema. The film’s title is taken, at least in part, from the 1947 film starring Humphrey Bogart.

Links to the previous six The task is impossible films abound, including the return of Canadian actor Henry Czerny as Hunt’s nemesis Kittridge from the first film in the franchise in 1996.

The early desert sequence is reminiscent of such big screen desert epics as Lawrence of Arabia (1962), while the encounter with the Entity’s power on a submarine echoes The hunt for Red October (1990) and others.

Classic car, train chase

The 20-minute car chase through the streets of Rome includes an endangered baby stroller on the steps, a reference to the same scenario from director Sergei Eisenstein’s influential film. Battleship Potemkin since 1925.

Cruise is handcuffed to his co-star Hayley Atwell, a stunt that has been used in various films, including the James Bond film. Tomorrow never dies (1997), driving a small yellow Fiat resembling both Italian work (1965) and The Bourne Identity (2002).

There’s even an extended sequence where Hunt fights enemies on the roof and throughout the Orient Express train, reminiscent of everything from Agatha Christie films to Buster Keaton films. General (1926), for another James Bond film, From Russia with love (1963), the plot of which is based on the threat of abuse of cyber technology.

Numerous cinematic references refer to films that predate the era of streaming and social media.

Physical presence: luxury?

Writers and actors have a right to worry. Because many processes in commercial media are already routinized, the industry is particularly vulnerable to generative AI.

Current circumstances are reminiscent of earlier transitions, such as the effect when films introduced sound technology, the threat to silent film actors dramatized in the Gene Kelly film, Singing in the rain. More recently, movie theaters have switched from celluloid to digital projection, largely eliminating projectionists.

Open resistance to new technologies is rarely successful in the long term. Business professor and pundit Scott Galloway compared the writers’ strike to the 1980s National Union of Mineworkers strike in northern England.

With so much digital content available, physical presence and intimacy are becoming rarer and therefore more luxurious.

Return to live experience

Of course, the public has actively returned to live music concerts. (Just try buying a Taylor Swift ticket to Toronto.)

For now, we’ll all have to wait and see how this ends for cinema and those who make it. Part two Mission: Impossible: Dead Time won’t be released until next summer.

I hope it’s a Hollywood ending for all of us.

Sarah Bay-Cheng is Dean of the School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design and Professor of Theater and Performance at York University, Canada.

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