![]() Cruise and McQuarrie are paying sophisticated tribute to the glamorous European crime capers of the 1950s and 1960s, and that's a welcome choice at a time when we all have so much to worry about. Maybe M:I7 doesn't ultimately have much to say about our current fears, but that's a relief. The climactic sequence is set aboard a steam train which is chuffing its way through meadows and mountains, and the only technology that really matters is the device that makes the gang's lifelike rubber masks. Despite all the initial concern about an electronic super-brain conquering the world, the fate of civilisation is to be decided by pickpocketing and sleight of hand, riddles and puzzles, fist fights and knife fights, car chases and foot chases. ![]() Yes, it's the kind of McGuffin that Alfred Hitchcock might have considered old-fashioned. It turns out that the only way to defeat the AI is with a little metal key made of two pieces that slot together, and which people tend to wear on thin chains around their necks, as if they were no more important than the keys to their bike locks. Soon afterwards, though, the film's director and co-writer, Christopher McQuarrie, establishes that M:I7 isn't a story about tech bros or computer viruses. This all seems horribly plausible, and, in one early scene, the threat is illustrated by one of the film's few memorable images (stunts aside): a room full of typists hurriedly transferring the intelligence services' data to paper so that The Entity can't read it. It wants to have total control of every scrap of information on Earth. It isn't content with stealing jobs from hardworking journalists, like so many AIs. The villain in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (let's call it Mission: Impossible 7 or M:I-7 for short) isn't even a human being, but a sentient artificial intelligence called The Entity. ![]() ![]() Tom Cruise's seventh Mission: Impossible film is an unusual mix of high-tech and low-tech, of ultra-modern and defiantly traditional. ![]()
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