In Rogue Nation, the latest instalment of the Mission Impossible franchise, every element of the formula has been polished to perfection. Ethan (Tom Cruise) is just weathered and leathery enough to bring off the virile leading man. The chick, Ilsa Faust (coolest movie name of the year, much better than her actual name, Rebecca Ferguson), has an ethereal Audrey Hepburn-esque beauty, moulded onto a titanium skeleton. Her climactic scene is a knife fight with a six-foot Russian assassin known for his bone-crushing prowess. Guess who walks away.
The supporting cast, Brandt, Benji and Luther (a stubbled, bleary Jeremy Renner, a heavyset Ving Rhames and the anti-Cruise, Simon Pegg) know how to play to give Ethan all the room he needs. And the effects, car chases, acrobatic martial arts tableaux, and extravagant scenery (the Moroccan desert, Parisian streets, a baroque Viennese opera hall, the drone shots of night-time London) slips by with a narcotic visual voluptuousness.
So if that's what you need from Cruise and the MI movies, you're good to go and be blown away– sights, sounds, adrenaline, testosterone. But those sinuosities are wrapped around another, more intriguing theme running through the movie, and pop and even international institutional culture these days: the notion that crime is not a black-and-white affair–its motives are not evident or simple, and its agents not outsiders, but quite the opposite.
Put another way, the idea of the single, local entity, individual or country, operating in its own interest outside of "the law" is pass�. There's a slow imaginative awakening of the popular mind to the cabal, the invisible hand, the secret transnational shadow government comprised of the one per cent, that really run the world, pursuing its agenda on many fronts simultaneously.
And one point of that agenda is to get rid of the competition. As Rogue Nation opens, IMF is about to be disbanded; after the obligatory opening stunt, hanging onto the fuselage of a plane in flight, Ethan is captured by Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) the CEO, or at least COO of the shadowy global Syndicate. He is freed by the mysterious, and hot, Ilsa, whose divided loyalty provides almost too neat turning points for the generic plot.
Ilsa is British Secret Service, undercover, but maybe not, and the CIA is in the picture. But with a difference; ostensibly the days of "black" operations are at an end in the new era of transparency. (Not as far-fetched as you'd think when you consider Edward Snowden and Wikileaks.) And all round, things are complicated. The bad stuff done by the good guys for their governments is now being disavowed, and people like Ethan and Ilsa find themselves hanging on by very fragile threads. But there's another world they can escape to–Lane's organisation, which is linked subtly and invisibly to the official world.
And this is the world/connection Ethan must prove exists. After his escape, they move to the central, eponymous impossible task–to retrieve a datafile stored in an impenetrable vault which uses unbeatable biometric technology. So far, standard IM stuff. The only way to beat the technology involves diving into a giant sinkhole, swimming underground (without oxygen tanks), and physically breaking into the CPU of the system to switch data cards, so the person penetrating the system will be accepted by the computer.
Well, this is one sinkhole too many, and it proves too much even for Ethan, who actually dies, but is brought back to life by Ilsa, who promptly steals the datafile and returns it to British Intelligence, who, it appears, no longer wants it, and throws Ilsa back into the shark tank. (Faustian pacts all round, it seems.)
And here it gets interesting. Mission Impossible has turned into mission misunderstood. What's the objective again? Who's the enemy? The only thing standing between the Syndicate's reality and unreality is the datafile. But there's a complication: it's encrypted and only one person can open it: the British Prime Minister. Another impossible mission, but finally, the team wises up–the game has changed.
Enter from the shadows Lane, Satan himself to take over from Mephistopheles. He's no hands-off shadow, whispering and coaxing; he's hands-on, smart and willing to get down and dirty. He easily anticipates the team's every move, and turns their countermeasures against them. The attempt to assassinate the Chancellor of Vienna is foiled, apparently, and he is got to his private car and security. But there's a bomb in the car.
The MI team, beaten, broken and disavowed by the Secretary as promised by the self-destructing message, then turns its attention to Lane. This is the final twist of the plot of the film: to undo the devil's greatest deception, convincing the world that he doesn't exist.
It's an interesting motif of the movie, which seems to be recurring in pop as well as institutional culture. The James Bond franchise has returned to the idea of Spectre, the international criminal cabal. The television series, The Blacklist, has fallen back to the idea of a transnational cabal controlling world affairs.
The real-world analogue is a growing popular awareness of the "one per cent" who control the majority of the world's resources. This has naturally led the popular imaginative consciousness to observe concentrations of power and influence and find or create patterns. The influence of Goldman Sachs on the US Treasury is a popular inexplicable fact; the European response to the Greek crisis seems to be the will of a small group of people, which is indifferent to the mass, to logic common sense, and, apparently economics. And so on.
Nonetheless, if international Bilderberg conspiracy theory isn't your thing, Rouge Nation's beautiful people, car chases, fight scenes and stunning landscapes deliver to the more visceral desires as well.
�2 Raymond Ramcharitar viewed Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation courtesy Digicel Imax.