Next month’s action sequel Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One will find Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt facing a villain the likes of which he has never faced before… artificial intelligence. Speaking with Collider, returning director Christopher McQuarrie explained why he felt that the threat of AI would make the perfect bad guy in the latest installment, with the filmmaker and Cruise calling out AI long before it started making real-world headlines.
“Very early conversations, probably the earliest conversations about this were in 2018/2019, and we were looking for the villain, the next threat in Mission. We’ve done nuclear threats, we’ve done chemical threats, biological threats, you did the Rabbit’s Foot, and God knows what threat that was. In trying to keep it fresh, we were looking outward, and the big conversation I had with Tom [Cruise] very early on was about technology, information technology, and what, now, everyone is talking about is AI.”
The threats posed by AI and how its use could take over a variety of human endeavors has been in the headlines a lot recently. Of course, this is Mission: Impossible, and thus Dead Reckoning Part One finds Ethan Hunt and his team tracking down a terrifying new AI weapon that threatens humanity before it falls into the wrong hands. With control of the future and the fate of the world at stake, and dark forces from Ethan’s past closing in, a deadly race around the globe begins.
Mission: Impossible 7 Will Tap Into Real Life Anxieties About AI
The plan is for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One to tap into real life anxieties about AI, with McQuarrie likening it to the threat posed by the Cold War.
“The thing I liken it to is the Cold War. When I was growing up, the Cold War was very real, it was a very present thing. We were under the threat, we believed, of nuclear annihilation, that at any point, there could be a war between two or three nuclear superpowers. So when you went to see a Cold War movie, you didn’t need somebody to set up the threat of the Cold War, you just felt it. It was something you brought to the movie. So my conversation with Tom was, ‘What are people bringing to the movie now? They’re not bringing the Cold War, they’re not bringing the war on terror, they’re bringing something new, and what is it? What’s this anxiety?'”
However, rather than just used our fears against us for the purposes of the story, McQuarrie hopes to make audiences feel a little better about how all this drama with AI will turn out.
“I felt, in the zeitgeist, this anxiety about technology and what and how technology was beginning to influence our lives, and how do we take that anxiety that the audience is bringing to the movie and give them a release? That’s really what the movie boils down to. When you go to see Top Gun in 1986, the Cold War was a very real thing. That anxiety was something you were bringing to it, and you enjoyed that movie because that movie was telling you that everything was ultimately gonna be okay. You were showing them a way out.”
Unfortunately, we may have to wait a little while before feeling better about things, as McQuarrie has also promised that things will get even “wilder with A.I. fears” when it comes to the follow-up, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 2.
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, and starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Esai Morales, Vanessa Kirby, Pom Klementieff, and Henry Czerny, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is scheduled to be released on July 12, with Dead Reckoning Part Two set to be released on June 28, 2024.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
