Ethan Hunt and team continue their search for the terrifying AI known as the Entity — which has infiltrated intelligence networks all over the globe — with the world's governments and a mysterious ghost from Hunt's past on their trail. Joined by new allies and armed with the means to shut the Entity down for good, Hunt is in a race against time to prevent the world as we know it from changing forever.
26 Jun Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)
Comparative Truths
We live in era of extreme local situated information. Trump and his ilk exploit this model, refined by Fox News, but I think it is a set of deeper and more global effects. Here’s how it works: If you want certain elements in your narrative to have more heft or truth, then you artificially increase their relative weight.
Here we have friendship for example, or as Fast and Furious have it:’family’. You have to emphasise and simplify that to comic proportions. If you want the franchise to be based on Tom Cruise’s famed ‘real’ stunts you have to similarly amplify as much as possible. But the law of situated influence means you have to make everything that surrounds it as untrue as possible, to have as little weight as can be.
So if you have our hero underwater getting something in a sub and the point is his remarkable commitment, then the sub itself and the supposed missiles and torpedos have to be obviously as imagined by a ten year old. The relative truth amplifies the ‘truth’ or the situated influence of his endurance.
This works at scale as well. Every ancillary situation, even every set has to be as fake as you can get away with, drawing from comic books or old Japanese tropes or whatever. Of the places in this film that actually exist, I think I’ve been in most of them. The cheesy, childish depiction of them is not a budget issue or a talent shortage. They really want the world’s truth, its reality suppressed. That’s how we often think, and how the market of presentation is increasingly training us.
Posted in 2025
Ted’s Evaluation — 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
No Comments