The Half-Remembered Lesson
A Case Study in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)
“Twenty-nine years after a man held his breath above a pressure-sensitive floor and let silence do all the work, this franchise closes by relearning only half that lesson.”
The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. Their purpose is to examine the craft behind exceptional filmmaking—celebrating successful creative choices while identifying opportunities where different decisions might have served the story even better. This piece also closes out a retrospective that has followed this franchise across all eight films, and it will spend its final section drawing those threads together.
This article discusses significant plot details throughout, including the film’s ending.
The last piece in this retrospective ended on a bet. Dead Reckoning Part One broke a twenty-seven-year-old contract with its audience on two fronts at once—narratively, by explaining its central mystery before earning any curiosity about it, and visually, by burying its most dangerous practical stunt under layers of digital reassurance it had never needed before. The bet, implicit in calling that film “Part One,” was that whatever went wrong would get fixed by “Part Two.” The Final Reckoning is where that bet gets settled. The answer turns out to be more interesting, and more honest about how hard this actually is, than a simple pass or fail.
The franchise relearned exactly half its own lesson. It relearned it completely, and at real physical cost, on the visual side of the promise. On the narrative side, it didn’t relearn the lesson at all—and, remarkably, the people who made the film have said so themselves.
The Body Keeps Its Word
Start with what this film gets right, because it’s not a small thing. The signature underwater sequence—Ethan diving into the wreck of the submarine Sevastopol to recover the drive that can kill the Entity—was built almost entirely for real. The production constructed a submarine interior mounted on a 1,000-ton steel gimbal capable of rotating a full 360 degrees and pitching 45 degrees in either direction, housed inside an 8.5-million-liter tank that took fifteen days just to fill. Cruise performed the sequence in a dive suit that weighed roughly 125 pounds once wet, working in intervals capped at ten minutes because any longer risked hypoxia from rebreathing his own exhaled air. He’s described doing much of it functionally blind, unable to see past the reflections off the underwater lighting rigs, having to map the space by feel during rehearsal so his body could find its marks once the cameras rolled and his vision failed him. According to the film’s stunt coordinator, Cruise was briefly trapped during one take when the plan called for real debris—a torpedo, collapsing shelving—falling through the flooding compartment around him, with only a CG extension shaving the last few inches off anything that could have actually struck him.
The biplane finale is, if anything, an even more direct answer to the previous film’s central failure. Cruise, sixty-two years old during production, hung from the exterior of a restored 1940s biplane in genuine flight at roughly 150 miles an hour and 8,000 feet, transferring between the upper and lower wings while the aircraft performed real aerial maneuvers. There is no CGI double standing in for him and no green-screen compositing standing in for the sky. By multiple accounts, Cruise had to be helped off set afterward, physically spent from what the sequence demanded of him.
That’s not incidental to this being the story’s final chapter. It reads as a deliberate correction. McQuarrie has said directly, in promoting this film, that the production consciously pushed back toward practical filmmaking after finding the digital compositing on Rogue Nation “very, very frustrating,” and applied that same lesson again after Dead Reckoning’s motorcycle jump drew exactly the criticism this retrospective raised about it. Whatever else this film gets wrong, it did not repeat that specific mistake. If anything, it overcorrects toward proving its reality as directly and uncompromisingly as this franchise ever has.
It’s worth being honest that the commitment to practicality doesn’t mean every seam stays hidden. Earlier in the film, during a hand-to-hand fight, Ethan gets thrown into a breakaway wall section that visibly reveals its padding on impact—the kind of small production error that has nothing to do with digital mediation and everything to do with a stunt not quite landing as designed. It’s a minor moment, but it’s a useful reminder that “practical” and “flawless” aren’t the same guarantee; real stunts still carry real risk of a seam showing, even in a film otherwise committed to hiding as little as possible.
There’s a smaller sequence buried inside the submarine dive that deserves its own credit, because it’s arguably the clearest rebuttal this film offers to its own worst habit. For roughly fifteen minutes as Ethan swims deeper into the wreck, alone, the film drops nearly all its dialogue—by one count, exactly two words are spoken in the entire stretch, muttered by Ethan to himself, mostly to help the audience place where he is rather than to communicate anything to another character. No narration. No briefing. No one else in the frame to explain what the audience is looking at. Just pressure, cold, wreckage, and a man running out of air, alone. It’s tense in exactly the way the Langley vault was tense in 1996: the environment supplies the stakes, and the film trusts the audience to feel them without being told to. For fifteen minutes, buried in the middle of its own longest and most explanation-heavy runtime, The Final Reckoning proves it still remembers exactly how to make a Mission: Impossible movie. It just doesn’t trust that lesson enough to build the rest of itself around it.
The Screenplay Breaks Its Word Again
Everything the stunt work relearns, the screenplay forgets a second time, more thoroughly than the film before it. The picture opens with an extended recap sequence gathering footage from across the entire franchise, then spends its first stretch moving through a mission briefing, a capture in which Gabriel pauses to recount events the audience already watched unfold in the previous film, and an escape in which Ethan and Grace fight free of his men while he slips away—the same appetite for restating what’s already been established that made Dead Reckoning’s opening thirty minutes such a struggle, deployed again here at even greater length. Later sequences return to briefing rooms repeatedly, often accompanied by maps, flags, and a literal on-screen countdown clock layered over stakes the film has already made clear through simpler means. The ending resolves not with the understated final shot this franchise built its reputation on in 1996, but with ninety seconds, spread across nineteen shots, of characters silently exchanging glances of mutual understanding—confirmation of feelings and relationships the audience has already grasped, restated one more time for certainty’s sake.
This isn’t a minority reaction to the finished film. Critics who otherwise praised the production repeatedly reached for the same language independently: one called the screenplay’s exposition simply excessive, another wrote that the script “no longer trusts that the audience is smart enough to follow along,” and a third argued directly that, unlike the ensemble farewells it was clearly trying to emulate, this film “doesn’t trust its audience.” That’s a strikingly consistent read from critics who didn’t coordinate with each other, converging independently on the exact failure this retrospective identified in the previous installment.
What makes that failure more interesting than simple repetition is what happened in the edit bay before anyone saw the finished film. McQuarrie has said publicly that after the reception to Dead Reckoning, he and Cruise looked hard at how to fix it—he attempted a non-linear cut for this film, restructuring the story’s order in an effort to address the pacing problems the previous film drew criticism for. By his own account, it didn’t work, and the production reverted to something closer to the version that opened this film. In his own words, describing the studio’s overall approach to exposition across the production: they don’t avoid it, they “overshoot it and overinform and overinclude,” then spend the edit trying to claw back only as much as the story can survive losing.
That’s a genuinely rare thing to have on the record: the filmmakers not only aware of the exact problem this retrospective has been tracing since the previous film, but actively attempting to solve it, and openly acknowledging that the attempt didn’t hold. It reframes the criticism without erasing it. This isn’t a production that doesn’t know what trust costs. It’s a production that tried to pay it back, ran out of runway to make the alternative work on a schedule already stretched by years of delay between two films meant to be a single story, and defaulted to the version it knew it could finish. Understanding why a mistake happens twice doesn’t make it not a mistake. It does make it a considerably more sympathetic one.
An Antagonist Who Never Quite Arrives
The same instinct shows up again in how the film handles its ending confrontation. Gabriel—the Entity’s chosen human agent, part prophet, part henchman, never fully settling into either—dies not through a moment Ethan has to reckon with morally, but through a slapstick collision with the plane’s tail after a chase that plays, right up until that instant, like something closer to games than genuine menace. Compare that to how this franchise has closed out its previous antagonists: Owen Davian dies because Julia pulls the trigger, completing her arc as much as Ethan’s. August Walker’s death depends on a cargo hook Ethan spent the whole climax gambling everything on, engineered and paid off with real dramatic logic. Gabriel’s death is an event that happens to him rather than a resolution anyone earns. It’s a small failure with a large cause: this is a franchise built on human confrontation, and an antagonist defined by serving something inhuman was never going to resolve as cleanly as one built entirely from his own convictions.
The final act’s other big emotional beat—Ethan sealing the improvised kill-switch into the Entity’s transmitter mid-freefall, rather than pulling his parachute first and handling it safely on the way down—suffers from the same instinct in miniature. The outcome is identical either way. Doing it the harder, more theatrical way manufactures urgency the scene didn’t actually need, in a film that had already proven, fifteen minutes earlier in a flooding submarine, that it knows how to generate real tension without needing to stage it.
Donloe's Alaska
Set against all of that, one piece of this film’s continuity work deserves to be singled out as a genuine triumph, because it’s the clearest possible answer to a question this retrospective has been quietly asking since its very first entry: what does it mean for this franchise to remember its own history properly?
William Donloe is not a major character in the original Mission: Impossible. He’s an analyst on duty the night Ethan drops into the Langley vault—a man who gets drugged, humiliated, and banished to a radar station in Alaska by a furious Kittridge, and then never appears again for twenty-nine years. He has, by design, no arc, no dialogue with Ethan, no reason to matter beyond a single punchline about exile. The Final Reckoning brings him back not as a cameo or an easter egg, but as a load-bearing character—married to an Inuk woman named Tapeesa he met during his decades of exile, still working a remote post for the agency that discarded him, and instrumental enough to the plot’s resolution that the film’s climax depends on his specific expertise. He carries none of the bitterness the setup would justify. He simply turns out, twenty-nine years later, to have been quietly essential the entire time.
That’s the payoff to a commitment this franchise made to itself as far back as its first sequel and has kept, with real discipline, ever since: characters who reappear get treated with the weight their history has actually earned, whether that’s Luther building trust across eight films, Kittridge’s slow turn from adversary to ally, or a two-scene extra from 1996 becoming one of this closing film’s most quietly moving presences. Not every choice in The Final Reckoning trusts its audience. This one does, completely, and it’s worth noting that the choice cost nothing in spectacle to make. It only required remembering that a person the story once treated as disposable was still worth checking in on.
What This Retrospective Found
Eight films and twenty-nine years is a long enough run to see a shape, and it’s worth naming plainly now that the shape is complete.
The institutional arc runs from betrayal to abandonment to dissolution and back again. Ethan begins this series hunted by the very organization whose name is in the title, and for six films afterward the IMF is something he survives more often than something he belongs to—doubted, disavowed, dismantled outright by Rogue Nation. By the time this film closes, the government characters most associated with distrusting him—Kittridge chief among them—have become some of his most committed allies, and even a man like Donloe, whose entire onscreen life was defined by an institution discarding him, ends up fighting to save it. The through-line was never really about spycraft. It was about whether trust, once broken this many times, can still be rebuilt on the far side of it. This film’s answer, for its characters if not always for its screenplay, is yes.
The acceleration this retrospective has tracked since Ghost Protocol—the Burj Khalifa, the airplane exterior, the HALO jump, the motorcycle cliff launch—finally meets its ceiling here, and the franchise’s response to that ceiling is the single most encouraging thing about this closing chapter. Dead Reckoning’s answer, when a genuinely dangerous practical stunt needed to feel bigger than the one before it, was to wrap it in digital reassurance. This film’s answer, facing a sixty-two-year-old star and a stunt arguably more dangerous than any that preceded it, was to refuse every available shortcut and do it anyway, at real physical cost that shows up in the reporting rather than staying hidden behind the scenes. The deceleration this retrospective wondered about as far back as the first film’s aging discussion never actually arrived as decline. It arrived as choice—the choice, every time, to keep closing the distance between what Ethan does on screen and what the person playing him is willing to survive off it, right up to the last film where that choice was ever going to matter.
And running beneath both of those arcs is the idea this retrospective’s last two entries finally gave a name: trust, extended or withheld, as this franchise’s actual currency. Every film in this series has been selling the same promise in two forms at once—understand the story the way Ethan does, not before him; believe the stunt because the camera lets you verify it, not because you’re asked to take the studio’s word. The Final Reckoning is proof that a production can rebuild one half of that promise completely, at enormous personal cost to the people making it, while still not fully trusting itself to rebuild the other. That’s not a contradiction. It’s what makes this such an unusually honest note to end on. Even in the film built to close the entire story, the lesson only landed halfway—which is a far more human way for a story about hard-won trust to finish than a clean, total victory would have been.
Final Thoughts
There’s a version of this ending built entirely out of the tools this franchise trusted from the very beginning: a real submarine, a real biplane, a real sixty-two-year-old man refusing to let anyone else carry the risk on his behalf, and a supporting player nobody expected to see again quietly proving that patience, sustained over decades, still pays off exactly as well as it did the first time. That version is sitting inside The Final Reckoning, fully intact, the same way the train sequence sat inside the film before it.
It’s simply sharing the runtime with a screenplay still catching up to what its own stunts have already proven. Twenty-nine years after a man held his breath above a pressure-sensitive floor and let silence do all the work, this franchise closes not by fully relearning that lesson, but by relearning half of it as completely as it’s ever been learned—and leaving the other half exactly where Dead Reckoning left it, waiting for an audience willing to believe it was worth the wait either way.