Movie Review – Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)
Written by Christopher McQuarrie & Drew Pearce
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie

And with this film, we reach the McQuarrie Era of Mission: Impossible. When Dead Reckoning Part 2 releases in 2024, McQuarrie will have directed half of the MI franchise. That makes it worth diving into what McQuarrie says about global foreign affairs. MI is a franchise grown out of the Cold War and anti-communism. Currently, communism as an engine of state power has been beaten back by an unrelenting capitalist assault. I know China has a Communist party as its core governmental body, and they implement policies that have undoubtedly lifted people out of poverty. However, I would argue, and many other communists would, too, that they have been teetering on the edge of communism and capitalism since Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. Communism has never been the offensive threat the West has made it out to be; nations who claim to have communist governments have always been entrenched in defensive positions from outside interference. All that to say, there is no genuinely threatening “commie” bogeyman for these types of films any longer.

Since 9/11, global terrorism has been a quick go-to for movie franchises playing in this sandbox. James Bond’s villains have become less megalomaniacal masterminds and more terroristic in their operations. Mission: Impossible’s film series began in 1996, five years after the Soviet Union fell. Smartly, those first couple of movies focused on internal dissent, IMF agents gone rogue as people who had devoted their lives to this singular American obsession now had to work outside their code of honor to make their way in a strange, new world. JJ Abram’s Mission: Impossible entry focused on a black market arms dealer who was clearly an American. With Ghost Protocol delivering the worst villain in the MI series, we got a generic terrorist who wanted a war between the US and Russia because that would somehow end the world? I still see this as hinged on the old Cold War ideas and a fading memory of the Soviet Union. So what does Rogue Nation give us?

At the end of Ghost Protocol, there was a brief mention of the Syndicate. In Rogue Nation, we get some more details. The Syndicate is a consortium of field agents across the Western intelligence community. They have gone rogue (as all agents seem to do in this universe) and are working for a mysterious figure (Sean Harris). Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is on their trail but gets ambushed at an IMF station, where he’s gassed and wakes up in a torture chamber. Before these Syndicate members can begin taking Hunt apart, a woman among them reveals her true colors and helps Hunt escape. Once again, Hunt is labeled as having gone rogue and is hunted by the bad guys and his government. 

Meanwhile, CIA director Hunley (Alec Baldwin) testifies before Congress that the IMF should be decommissioned and all their assets transferred to the CIA. He bases this on the bombing at the Kremlin (which I thought was clearly verified as the doings of Cobalt, but okay). Benji (Simon Pegg) and Brandt (Jeremy Renner) begin working for the CIA but are covertly gathering intel to help Ethan, who is in the field trying to find proof of the Syndicate to redeem himself.

So who is the villain at the center of Rogue Nation? Solomon Lane, an ex-MI6 agent. The label applied to Lane is that of “anarchist,” one of many complete mislabelings of bad guys in movies. The popular view of anarchists, mainly in the West, are people who simply want chaos. Nihilist and anarchist have become interchangeable terms, and the reality of what these ideologies represent couldn’t be further apart. In picking a label for myself, I have chosen “communist,” which means an economic system & government centralized within state power but driven by a more direct democracy than a representative one. The state would have a planned economy and move around resources as needed proportionately based on ability & need. That’s a very brief summation, but it gets to the core of my personal beliefs. 

Anarchism is sort of, for lack of a better explanation, like the libertarian version of communism. Under anarchism, there would be no government as we currently define it. There would be no intelligence or police entities to monitor people with the intent of shaping their behavior. They believe that people should be allowed to form societies they choose as equals, with some basic tenets of consent, empathy, and mutual aid at the core. I personally believe that humanity, particularly Americans, as that is where I grew up, is not ready for such a radical change as anarchism would be and that something like socialism or communism can provide a bridge to such a society. I think the end goal of anarchism is admirable; I just haven’t been convinced that we could jump from capitalism into anarchism without significant hurdles. Moving from our current system into communism would come with all sorts of unforeseen problems, but they would be far easier to tackle than this more radical jump. I concur that humanity’s goal should be an anarchic world where people live as they please, following those core ideals.

So, when Lane is called an anarchist, and his plot seems to involve setting off nuclear devices and killing billions, I had to roll my eyes. This is not anarchism, and it is closer to nihilistic right-wing terrorism. An anarchist would be setting up a commune, engaging in mutual aid, or some other effort to aid the people at the bottom of society’s ladder. It’s okay if that creates dissonance in your mind. You likely live in a society where anarchy is incorrectly defined across every major institution and purposefully so. Any ideology anathema to the status quo will be misidentified and intentionally misconstrued. For once, in a film like this, I would like to see the villain as some founder/CEO of a multinational corporation engaged in poisoning the planet or pumping the pharmaceutical industry full of intentionally addictive & destructive medications. You know, the actual villains that exist in our world? Their terrorism is far slower moving but more devastating than the impulsive acts attributed to the Syndicate.

But that’s the trend in contemporary Western cinema as neoliberalism grips even tighter. The enemy of our “wonderful world” are those who want to change things. The Flagsmashers in The Falcon & The Winter Soldier were the same thing. Wanting to change the world to improve things for those who live with nothing is always framed in Hollywood blockbusters as bad. These days they might allow the villain to have their edges softened a bit, let the audience empathize just a teeny bit, but in the end, you remind the viewer that to allow such change might rock the boat a little too much, so it’s better to kill these people before they move the needle one iota. 

This was also the moment when MI began to lose its identity. There is a really great action set piece here in the Vienna Opera House. One of the best the series has ever given us, with multiple points to pay attention to, all intersecting in exciting ways. However, the rest of the set pieces leave much to be desired. There’s a motorcycle chase with brief flashes of brilliance that ultimately falls flat. The underwater sequence is rough, a reminder of how much better this franchise is when it doesn’t rely on computer-generated imagery. 

We’ve also reached the point where seeing these agents outside the context of IMF missions is necessary. I know what Ethan Hunt looks like running against the clock. I know what he looks like, suspended from a cable in midair. I know what he looks like leaping off a great height. What does he do when he’s not on missions? How about Benjy or Luther? The movie has increasingly adopted the Fast & Furious “family” ethos regarding Hunt and his team. But you know what the F&F movies do? They show us the characters when they aren’t going on a wild mission around the world. 

The result of containing these characters in a vacuum is that they have lost their humanity to me. They are workaholics, apparently with no private lives. And hey, if that is the case, we could explore the detrimental effects such a lifestyle would have on a person. Antisocial behaviors could lead to an agent not knowing how to function in a team setting or, even more interesting, struggling to operate in the civilian world without an IMF team. These could be folded into action-heavy, globe-trotting plots, adding more depth to characters running on a treadmill now. They are sexless automatons at a center point who can make quips. Yeah. Rebecca Ferguson might be in a bikini and be presented as “sexy,” but there is no chance you will ever see a sex scene between her and Tom Cruise in these movies. Like so many blockbusters, these movies have erased sex as an aspect of people’s lives. This article about this trend from a few years back nails the point in its headline, “Everyone is Beautiful, and No One is Horny.” 

Now that we have a “showrunner” for the MI franchise for the foreseeable future, we need the series to go deeper. Before, the novelty could be a different filmmaker’s take on the premise, shifting around to various directors with distinct styles. That is over now, so this series needs to start to pull back the layers of Hunt and associates. Do I hold out any hope that we will see a shift in neoliberal global politics within Hollywood movies in my lifetime? Of course not. This is a movie made by an American institution, and they will cling to the status quo until the world falls out from underneath their feet. I don’t expect to see a popular film series where they gun down the head of a planet-destroying corporation in my lifetime. Next up, Fallout.