Is the new Mission Impossible really about Our Fair Future?
Tom Cruise finally parts with Scientology and goes OFF
In Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Ethan and his team set out to defeat “the Entity”, an advanced AI that sows distrust and misinformation among people and nations in the hope of destroying humanity. It isn’t too much of a spoiler to state that the world comes together and the Entity is thwarted.
The Entity bears a resemblance to the polluters and their cronies in government who pump out endless misinformation, sowing distrust between different groups of people—ethnicities, political ideologies and so on—who in fact need to be united in their resistance. Remember, the polluters want to divide us to prevent us from resisting them.
Now, we’re not expecting people to swim into a sunken submarine or grapple with a villain in an upside-down biplane, but there are some takeaways from the movie that can be applied to our lives literally:
make choices as if you are in a life-or-death situation
be prepared to sacrifice yourself for others
think in terms of saving all humanity
work with whoever you need to in order to get stuff done
ignore the rules that others try and impose on you
understand that all your life has been leading up to this moment
At the end of the movie there is a monologue from Luther that comes right up to the edge of cringe, but which is nevertheless saved due to stating a simple truth that could be an OFF manifesto (made all the more pertinent given the team have once again beaten mind-boggling odds to save the world):
Any hope for a better future comes from willing that future into being. A future reflecting the measure of good within ourselves. And all that is good inside us is measured by the good we do for others. We all share the same fate, the same future. The sum of our infinite choices. One such future is built on kindness, trust, and mutual understanding, should we choose to accept it. Driving without question towards a light we cannot see. Not just for those we hold close but for those we'll never meet.
That is the OFF mindset, should you choose to accept it.