What To Know Before Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
A recap of all 7 movies leading up to the release of The Final Reckoning
I’m a huge Mission: Impossible fan and recently rewatched the whole series to prepare for the 8th movie, The Final Reckoning so here’s everything you need to know!
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Mission: Impossible (1996)
Agents of the IMF, or Impossible Mission Force, are typically portrayed as classic spies. They know how to handle a weapon but their default strategy is to use gadgets, stealth, and trickery to outwit their opponents. They’re often performing heists and sting operations, but with big, global stakes.
In our very first mission with Ethan Hunt, the protagonist of all eight movies, everything goes wrong and his whole team is wiped out, including his mentor, Jim Phelps.
It turns out this mission was a setup by the IMF to find a traitor and since Ethan is the only survivor, they assume it’s him. Thus, Ethan becomes a disavowed agent — his government has disowned him, he's gone rogue. He sets out to clear his name by finding the actual traitor, all while being pursued by his own agency, led by a man named Kittridge.
Throughout the series, Ethan often finds himself needing to steal a McGuffin. Some kind of object, a secret hard drive or a nuclear weapon, something that fuels the plot. Here, to expose the real traitor, Ethan needs to steal a list of IMF operatives from his own government. Which is how we get this famous scene:
He does this with the help of expert hacker, Luther, who ends up being one of the few characters that appears in every Mission Impossible movie.
The actual traitor is revealed to be Ethan’s mentor, Jim Phelps, who faked his own demise and is now trying to frame Ethan for everything. Ethan is able to catch Jim, clear his name and in the final scene we see that he has taken Jim’s place as an IMF team leader.
MI: 2 (2000)
The second movie is definitely the black sheep of the Mission Impossible family. Plot wise, it’s pretty standard, but stylistically it’s a little different.
An ex-IMF operative is working with a pharmaceutical corporation to release a deadly virus that they’ve already manufactured a cure for, so they can profit from the sudden demand. The story revolves heavily around Ethan’s relationship with Nyah, who is pretending to be in a relationship with the bad guy. So Ethan is constantly having to choose between the mission and her safety.
By the end, they destroy the virus, take out the bad guys, and Ethan and Nyah walk into the sunset together.
MI: 3 (2006)
But apparently it didn’t work out, because at the start of the third movie, Ethan is about to settle down with his new fiancé, Julia. Ethan is retired as a field agent and Julia has no idea about his work in the IMF.
But he’s convinced to go back for one final mission because the villain, Davian, is responsible for the death of an agent that Ethan trained, and he wants revenge.
So, he sets out to capture Davian, and uses one of the most consistent and unique tools in the IMF’s bag of tricks - MASKS. The IMF has the ability to create masks and voice chips that can make you look and sound like anybody. And in every single movie, there’s at least one scene involving masks.
Ethan impersonates Davian while the real Davian is taken by Ethan’s team. As villains tend to do, Davian escapes anyway and at the same time, his agents kidnap Julia. To save her, Ethan is forced to steal something called “The Rabbit’s Foot”. Naturally, because of this he’s disavowed (for the 2nd time).
Ethan recruits the help of Benji, who like Luther, becomes a permanent member of Ethan’s team.
Ethan saves Julia, defeats Davian, and recovers Rabbit’s Foot — which we learn is some kind of world-ending threat, “an anti-god” as Benji calls it, but we never find out what exactly it is because Ethan opts to leave the IMF to go with his wife, Julia.
MI: Ghost Protocol (2011)
But sadly Ethan seems to have left Julia behind because now he’s chasing a man named Kurt Hendricks, who’s trying to get Russia’s nuclear launch codes. To gain information on Hendricks, Ethan’s team infiltrates the Kremlin, but Hendricks is one step ahead of them and causes an explosion that destroys the Kremlin and pins the whole thing on Ethan and his team.
Now, there’s something to keep in mind about the IMF. As the Impossible Mission Force, they’re obviously a last resort, the people you call when all else has failed. They don't get orders or commands, they are offered missions, should they choose to accept. They have the choice to accept or reject missions because if they’re caught, their government will “disavow” all knowledge of their actions. They’re on their own.
Because of the Kremlin incident, the US President initiates Ghost Protocol, which disavows the entire IMF. Ethan and his team are once again rogue agents (Ethan’s 3rd time in four movies).
Ghost Protocol is the entry where we truly saw the beginning of Tom Cruise doing insane, real life stunts.
Ethan and the team eventually manage to stop Hendricks mere seconds before a nuclear missile strikes San Francisco. But we have one last reveal, about Julia. Ethan knew that she would never be safe because of his past as an IMF agent, so they agreed to part ways, giving Julia a secret identity to keep her safe.
MI: Rogue Nation (2015)
We’ve had recurring characters up to this point, but Rogue Nation is where we see plot points start to carry over as well. Ethan is up against Solomon Lane who leads The Syndicate, which is essentially an anti-IMF. An organization of rogue operatives seeking to upend the established world order through radical means. The biggest problem is that Ethan’s own government doesn’t believe the Syndicate exists.
In fact, Hunley, the director of the CIA, convinces a Senate committee to dissolve the IMF. You guessed it, Ethan is disavowed once again (this being the 4th time, but who’s keeping track?). But his team remains loyal and continues to help him from within the CIA.
Ethan also ends up working with British agent, Ilsa Faust, who is working undercover within the Syndicate. Ethan discovers that Ilsa is being forced to work for Lane by the British government, even after her cover is blown. This is because the British agency, MI6, is actually responsible for the creation of the Syndicate, originally intending it to be a secret force that could operate without oversight, but Lane took it over.
Ethan helps to vindicate Ilsa and prove that the Syndicate is real, by impersonating the MI6 Chief and tricking the Prime Minister into revealing the truth right in front of Hunley… who sums up the idea of Ethan Hunt very well:
The team also manages to capture Lane, hopefully disrupting the Syndicate for good.
MI: Fallout (2018)
But that was too good to be true, because in the 6th movie they’ve reorganized under somebody named John Lark, and they’re trying to acquire several plutonium cores which will allow them to launch multiple nuclear strikes.
Because Hunley was so impressed with Ethan and his team, he is no longer the CIA director, but is now leader of the IMF. He tasks Ethan with stopping John Lark however, Hunley’s CIA replacement, Erika Sloane, doesn’t trust the IMF and demands that her own agent, Walker, go along on the mission.
Ethan impersonates John Lark so he can intercept the plutonium cores. However he learns that the seller is not interested in money, and to get the cores, Ethan has to recover a human asset, none other than Solomon Lane, the actual leader of the Syndicate. Ethan manages to bring Lane and the plutonium cores to a secure location. Only then does Walker reveal himself to be the real John Lark, having worked as a covert Syndicate operative all along. He and Lane escape with the plutonium, killing Hunley in the process.
Ethan and the team track them to the site of the nuclear devices — a remote medical camp near the Himalayas, discovering that the radiation will poison a 3rd of the world’s water supply. And to add to Ethan’s stress, Lane arranged to have Julia working at the medical camp.
So, Ilsa, Benji, Luther and Julia team up to disarm the nuclear devices and stop Lane, while Ethan gets into a helicopter fight with Walker to secure the detonator, which he does in true Ethan Hunt style, with only seconds to spare.
MI: Dead Reckoning (2023)
We’re almost done. This movie and The Final Reckoning were intended to be a part one and part two, so the plot of this one is pretty important to understand the new movie.
The primary villain this time around is actually an artificial intelligence known as The Entity. In the opening scene we see The Entity hack a Russian submarine called the Sevastopol, tricking the crew into launching a missile against themselves and sinking the sub.
Elsewhere, there’s a global race between world powers to acquire both halves of a key. The governments believe the key controls the entity, but they’re not sure what it unlocks.
Naturally, the IMF sends Ethan and his team to get the key and we discover what the Entity really is – the most powerful AI ever created. It has infiltrated all of cyberspace and now controls information itself. It’s deleting information and creating fake information in its place, attacking the truth itself so it can deceive people into doing what it wants. Once Ethan learns this, he of course determines it’s too powerful for ANY government to control and resolves to destroy the Entity.
Ethan gets close to obtaining the key, but is sidetracked when a thief, Grace, steals the key for herself.
Ethan pursues Grace and ends up face to face with Gabriel, a servant of The Entity who believes the world would be better under the Entity’s control.
He demonstrates The Entity’s power by declaring either Ilsa or Grace will die that night, no matter what Ethan does. Ethan believes yet again, he can save everyone, but The Entity deals a fatal blow when it ends up being correct and Gabriel kills Ilsa.
However, Grace managed to keep the key. And here, we get a bit more background story for Ethan. The IMF finds people with special skills in dire situations and offers them a choice. Should they choose to accept, their slate is wiped clean and they become ghosts, choosing to fight for the greater good within the IMF. Long before Ethan joined the IMF, Gabriel caused the death of someone Ethan cared about, and framed him for it. Ethan was about to spend life in prison when the IMF offered him the choice. In a way, Gabriel set in motion the entire events of Mission: Impossible.
Since Grace has found herself on the radar of every government in the world, she is offered the choice and decides that after working with Ethan and his team and seeing how they care about each other, she will join them.
But to destroy the Entity, Ethan and and his team now need to find out what it unlocks, so they have Grace impersonate a seller and meet the buyer on a train hoping to learn more. The buyer ends up being none other than Kittridge, the IMF leader all the way back from the first movie, only now he’s the director of the CIA and trying to control the Entity on behalf of the US government.
But of course, who else is on the train? Gabriel AND the Director of US National Intelligence. The Director explains that the US created the Entity and lost control of it. They’re the ones that had The Entity infiltrate the Russian submarine at the beginning of the movie, but it was only intended to reveal the sub’s location, not destroy it. The AI went rogue. The key unlocks the data core of the Russian sub which now holds the source code for the Entity, and is the only thing that can control or destroy it.
The Director is trying to recruit Gabriel to get rid of this evidence, not realizing Gabriel works for the Entity. Instead Gabriel gets rid of him.
Ethan still believes nobody should have that power, so he recovers the key himself, outwitting the CIA agents that have been pursuing him the whole movie, as well as Gabriel.
He also manages to find one last ally in Paris, Gabriel’s top agent. Ethan had the opportunity to kill her but chose not to, and as a result she now tells Ethan everything she learned about The Entity.
The movie ends with Ethan, Benji, and Grace resolving to find the submarine so they can destroy the Entity’s source code. Luther goes to a secure site off-grid so he can work on a way to stop the Entity without it knowing their plans. They are of course still being pursued by Gabriel, the CIA, and other world powers but we’ll have to see what happens in The Final Reckoning. No, I’m not getting paid to do this, I just really like Mission: Impossible.
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