Don't bother watching it - my review of Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning

It'll hurt your brain.

“The Entity”, the evil AI villain in the movie.

My wife and I watched Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning a few days ago and it hurt our brains, both literally (with the extremely fast <100ms cuts in some scenes) and metaphorically, with the very deep well of utter nonsense that this movie kept drawing from.

In case you haven’t watched part 1 of this last movie, the basic plot synopsis is: an evil AI is taking over the world and planning to nuke all of mankind into oblivion. Why? Oh, who knows, we’re never told.

Here’s my brief review of some of the utterly stupid parts of this movie’s plot:

1. Tom Cruise, while flying down in a parachute in the middle of nowhere South Africa, plugs in one USB drive into another to somehow “synthesize” a virus that can destroy the evil AI. There is no antenna, no Wi-Fi, no cellular connection here, yet somehow, in less than a second, the virus on this drive wirelessly transmits itself to… everywhere in the internet, infects the evil AI that has spent the last few months infecting every computer network in the world, and then tricks it into isolating itself on a hard drive in some data center. Literally in less than a second. With no internet connection.

2. The virus that can kill the evil AI was developed by a dying man in a basement who’s never seen the AI’s source code, but he knows that if you plug the flash drive with the virus on it into a hard drive that contains the AI’s source code (which Tom Cruise has to retrieve from a sunken submarine), it will somehow be able to figure out all its weaknesses and kill the actual live AI that’s spread throughout cyberspace. Anybody who has ever written a program (or who can reason with logic) knows that viruses cannot be developed in isolation without ever having seen the system they’re targeting. This entire part of the plot is total nonsense.

3. The team’s plan hinges on the AI wanting to download itself into a data center bunker to protect itself from nuclear armageddon, and it can supposedly place itself on a 360 terabyte drive in a few seconds. Anybody who has experienced internet download speeds and general hard drive transfer speeds knows this is nonsense. Even though the movie involves a made-up 360 terabyte drive technology that glows (you know, for extra magical effect), even if such a drive existed, the existing regular technology in the data center would still not be able to transfer that kind of file in a couple of seconds. If you had an EXTREMELY fast data center connection you could maybe do it in an hour. More realistically you might be looking at a half-day transfer.

4. The AI’s grand plan is to nuke humanity by taking over the world’s nuclear arsenals and unleashing armageddon, and then hiding in a solar-powered data center in South Africa for 1,000 years. It’s never explained why this is a good idea, or how it benefits AI to sit around with no data inputs our outputs for a thousand years until it eventually also dies. Presumably this self-aware AI loves data and learning, so annihilating all sources of data input makes no sense.

5. For some reason, instead of making a copy of itself on the data center servers, it literally moves itself over, meaning it deletes itself from all of the internet first. This is vital to the plot because this allows Tom Cruise’s team to “trap” the evil AI in the data center. But why on earth would a computer program that spent months taking over the entire internet then delete itself from it all? Why not just make a backup copy?

6. In the last day before AI takes over all the nuclear arsenals (which somehow the U.S. government has predicted to the minute), the U.S. president (who is a black woman, of course), is told to nuke the capitals of every other nuclear-armed nation in the world. Beijing, Paris, Moscow, London, etc. - she’s told that this preemptive strike will stop them from being able to use their nukes, which by then were already taken over by the evil AI.

   1. First of all, silos, submarines, trains, airplanes, and other forms of nuclear warhead delivery devices. do not require a functioning capital city to work, that’s a basic redundancy. Most of them are independent, so all this would do is kill millions of people.

   2. She is told that if she “sacrifices” one of America’s cities, it will somehow make the other countries hate the U.S. government less, as if this is some kind of sick modern take on Aztec human sacrifices. “Look! We killed millions of our own people for literally no reason - now that you know we’re total psychos, you can relax and not go to war with us even though we nuked you.”

7. The plan hinges, among other things, on a woman staring at the hard drive and snatching it to disconnect it from the servers within less than 100 milliseconds of when it starts to glow. Any longer and the AI will realize it’s placed itself on a hard drive trap and leave. She’s a thief, so she has fast reflexes you see. Meanwhile, the hard drive, virus, and all the technology made to infect and trap the evil AI was made by supposed computer geniuses, who couldn’t have simply severed the connection to the drive within 100 milliseconds programmatically?

Note that I’m not even criticizing the action scenes, which are of course unrealistic - but part of the fun. You watch a Mission Impossible movie for the over-the-top action scenes, so that’s expected. But this movie wasn’t fun. It was painful to watch.

My advice? Only watch this movie if you enjoy taking apart absurd plots or if you like action scenes that make no sense. Otherwise, skip it.