When Tom Cruise flings himself into the space left by old technology’s outmoded modes, is he bridging a widening gyre or syncing with it?
Your mission, if you choose to accept it: we’re talking across Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018), and Mission: Impossible (1996) with the brilliant Vulture/New York Magazine film critic, Bilge Ebiri.
Much of what I saw in 2018 reflected a related range of anxieties—about difference, catastrophe, isolation, belonging. Maybe that’s every year. Likely it’s too soon to tell. But among the things I saw, in a year of personal and political upheaval and ambivalence, these are the moments that solicited my attention most memorably.
What makes Mission: Impossible - Fallout and Free Solo what they are is not death. It’s the spectatorship of death., watching those around a person come to terms with what we all know is out there.