The Impossible Man: Ethan Hunt in the Age of AI

Note: This article contains spoilers for the Mission: Impossible films, including the newest release, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.

It began on television in 1966. A Cold War-era procedural, jazzy and lean, with tape recorders that smoked as messages self-destructed seconds after they were played. Mission: Impossible was never about one man. It was a team show, an ensemble built around deception and masks, with Dan Briggs (Steven Hill) and later Jim Phelps (Peter Graves) leading the charge.

Each week, the team used disguises, cunning, and carefully coordinated sleights-of-hand to undermine dictators, coerce saboteurs, and expose double agents. Where other shows solved crimes with investigative techniques and guns, Mission: Impossible unraveled conspiracies with latex prosthetics and Rube Goldberg-level plot construction. It was less a shootout than a stage play, and the tension came from the question of whether or not the illusion would hold long enough for the team to complete the mission.

Thematically, it was a show about control, about strategy versus chaos. About order being delicately, even superficially, imposed on a world always threatening to break into war. It had no central star because, in most cases, the mission itself—the cause—was the star. Identity was fluid, and in its Cold War context, Mission: Impossible dramatized a very American kind of idealism: freedom through precision and deception in the name of democracy.

The show ended its original run in 1973. In 1988, the series was revived for two seasons. Much of the style remained intact: Graves returned as Phelps, the missions remained as intricate as ever, and the team-centric format was preserved. But the world had changed. These new episodes unfolded in the twilight of the Cold War and in the dawn of a more ambiguous geopolitical landscape. One in which enemies no longer wore uniforms, and threats to world peace were not always backed by clear-cut political ideologies.

If the original series had been a Cold War chess match, the 1988 revival was a prelude to the information age. The emphasis shifted subtly to accommodate the growing complexities of surveillance, bio-terrorism, and cybernetic manipulation. The Impossible Missions Force (IMF) stayed hidden in the shadows, even as the shadows began to warp around them. What remained constant, however, was the show’s moral architecture: the belief that a small group of dedicated individuals—operating with anonymity and moral clarity—could tilt the scales of justice. It was, at heart, a kind of modern parable concealed in the trappings of a mission-of-the-week espionage caper.

In 1996, Brian De Palma and Tom Cruise brought Mission: Impossible to the big screen. What followed was a reinvention that would lead the franchise from cloak-and-dagger theatrics to something stranger and more enduring: a long-form meditation on personal sacrifice and the soul of the human in an increasingly dehumanized world.

As Mission: Impossible expanded into a film series, what was once collective became a bit more individual, and what was once clever became kinetic. The first film played like De Palma channeling Hitchcock, and was as close to the original series in tone and execution that the films would ever get. The second, Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), was operatic and unhinged under the deft touch of iconic action director John Woo. Mission: Impossible III (2006), J. J. Abrams’ directorial debut, gave the series a beating heart, and Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) began to stabilize the films around an idea that had less to do with spycraft than it did human fidelity in the face of insurmountable situations.

By the time Christopher McQuarrie took over the franchise for his quartet of films, beginning with Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015), Cruise’s Ethan Hunt had ceased to be the new Jim Phelps and instead became a figure of constancy in a world quick to shed its skin. McQuarrie’s films reoriented the series and made it something a bit more ambitious. The trademark action remained, but it was now in service of character. The plots were still labyrinthine, but were more concerned with exploring how a man like Ethan Hunt survives in a world where identity and loyalty are endlessly negotiable.

Crucially, McQuarrie reintroduced The Syndicate—a rogue nation of ex-operatives and disavowed agents led by the soft-spoken Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), mirroring the IMF in both form and function but without a moral compass. At last, Hunt and his team were given a true antagonist: a villainous structure with the same tools and tactics, but none of the restraint. In giving Ethan a proper villain, the films gave him a proper ethic. He was no longer simply saving lives, but preserving a way of being: one in which individual conscience still mattered and no one—no one—was expendable.

This ethic crystallized most clearly in McQuarrie’s sophomore outing, Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018), arguably the franchise’s first true sequel in terms of continuity and emotional consequence. In that film, Hunt’s defining trait interestingly emerged as refusal: his refusal to allow one life to be traded for another, his refusal to choose the “greater good” if it means leaving someone behind. He is not a utilitarian hero. He is a moral absolutist operating in a morally ambiguous world. And that is what makes him both dangerous and fairly singular as a modern action hero.

By the time Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (2023) arrived, the series had outgrown its Cold War DNA. The threat was no longer human, nor was it a nation-state or rogue agency. Instead, it became systemic, manifested in the form of The Entity, a sentient artificial intelligence unbound by nation, logic, or material constraint. It could not be assassinated or reasoned with, it could only be resisted and refused.

With Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025), the series leaves behind the espionage thriller and enters into myth. The Entity becomes an omnipresent force, invisible and omniscient, capable of rewriting information and one’s perception of reality itself. It functions, in the theological register, as a god—or, at least, a parody of one. It sees all, knows all, predicts all, and demands nothing less than surrender. Into this brave new world steps Hunt—not as a chosen one, but as a man who chooses. Who refuses to cede the moral high ground, even when it makes no tactical or practical sense. And in doing so, he becomes something unexpected: the last man of faith in a world run by code.

If The Entity is the machine-god of the new age, then Gabriel (Esai Morales), its emissary, is the prophet of inevitability. He is named, pointedly, for the angel of annunciation. But here, the good news is inverted. There is no incarnation, only calculation. No freedom or grace, only foreknowledge and the certainty of a future already written. Like some dark prophet, he preaches the gospel of the closed loop: all outcomes have already been computed and all resistance accounted for. His faith lies not in God, but in a machine that can simulate omniscience and sees not people but probabilities. His call is not to repent, but to give up.

It is here that Mission: Impossible enters theological territory. The Entity becomes a metaphysical threat. It spells the end of meaning, the annihilation of choice. Its promise is a perfectly ordered future in which human agency is a relic, a bug in the system. It is Gnostic in its depth, apocalyptic in its scale, and blasphemous in its certainty. 

The Final Reckoning hits theaters with Hunt’s ethic given eschatological weight and significance. There is a key moment, early in this film, when Ethan encounters the Entity and is given a vision of the world’s destruction. His mission becomes about disproving The Entity and its algorithmic determinism, and instead proving that a man can still choose rightly, even when wrongness is cheaper, safer. It becomes about declaring why the unpredictable human still matters.

The final mission—if, in fact, The Final Reckoning turns out to be Hunt’s last ride—is surprisingly theological, marshaling a case for the soul itself, saying that in a world of false prophets and digital gods, the human still has something to contribute—something unquantifiable and dignified. Beneath the highly-publicized stunts, the spectacle, the masks, this franchise has evolved into a reflection on choice—the fragile and irreducible agency of a single human being faced with overcoming impossible odds. “Our lives are the sum of our choices,” a line echoed across McQuarrie’s last two films, is less a philosophical aside than it is a thesis in and of itself.

And in a cinematic landscape overrun with multiverses, retcons, and algorithmically generated inevitabilities, that emphasis is quietly radical. Hunt runs, jumps, climbs, dives, and hangs on for dear life to prove that it still matters that people choose at all. He risks everything to assert that moral clarity is not obsolete, and this is all wrapped in a package that takes some truly pointed shots at the digital age in which we find ourselves.

What began in 1966 as a sleek spy procedural has, over nearly sixty years, become a modern myth about the sacredness of agency in an age increasingly hostile to it. It becomes less about completing the mission, and more about why a man keeps choosing to accept it—when he doesn’t have to, when it won’t save him, and when the safe bet is to say that the outcome is already written.

The mission has ceased to be about stopping a bomb or unmasking a mole. It has become about protecting what makes humans human: the power to choose the right thing simply because it is the right thing, even at great cost.

And in the end, that might be the most impossible mission of all.