Did Tom Cruise Kill the Internet in the New Mission: Impossible or What?

Tom Cruise saves the world at the end of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning because that is what Tom Cruise does. When Mission: Impossible began, and Cruise had not yet completed his transformation into a celluloid being whose veins flowed with red carpets, his character, Ethan Hunt, had more modest concerns, like finding moles in the IMF and protecting the identities of undercover CIA agents. 30 years on, with the series coming to a close, mere terrorists just aren’t worthy foes for the patron saint of action cinema — he has to battle for no less than the survival of the human race against a malevolent, all-powerful artificial intelligence. Not only does Ethan triumph, he and his team disarm a nuclear bomb in a bunker, capture the evil AI in an extra-fancy USB drive, and win a biplane duel. When Ethan walks off into the night at the end of The Final Reckoning, you may be left wondering, Is this really all that final? Is Tom Cruise actually going to let go of the franchise that has become a platform for emphasizing how irreplaceable he is? But there’s another question that might come to mind as well: Did they destroy the internet, or what?

Because they sure talk about that a lot, whenever higher-ups in the movie argue over what to do about the Entity. The Entity can’t just be killed, because the Entity has infiltrated all of our systems, entwining itself with the digital ecosystem to the point where it seems to be inextricable from them. The Entity may be spreading misinformation, sowing paranoia, and corrupting data so that no computer-based records can be trusted, but what are we going to do — not go online? When the various world powers, and also Esai Morales, talk about wanting to control the Entity, it sounds vaguely like a baby-boomer congressperson describing TikTok as though it were a widespread brainwashing device and then salivating about it coming under U.S. ownership. Ethan is told, more than once, that his plan to kill the Entity will also destroy cyberspace. And then what does he do? He uses a virus called the Poison Pill on the Entity, tricks it into trapping itself in his glowing rectangle, and fries the core module containing its source code so that no one can replicate it later.

Does this count as killing the Entity? The whole deal with Mission: Impossible’s final boss is pretty hard to parse, but I’d like to think “yes.” I’d like to believe that the seemingly restored-to-normal London in which the film wordlessly regroups in that final shot is one in which the internet is no more and humanity has been forced en masse to touch grass. Cruise is no particular fan of the online realm, having endured an almost fatal meme-ing back in 2005, after he arm-wrestled Oprah on her talk-show couch to demonstrate the sincerity of his love for eventual spouse Katie Holmes. The Mission: Impossible movies, for all that they’re as reliant on digital effects as every major production, are also testaments to the power of the physical world — to shooting on location around the globe, to doing the actual stunts, to Cruise himself riding a motorcycle off a cliff so that cameras capture his cheeks flapping in the wind. When Ethan gets attacked on a submarine by a nihilistic cultist who was radicalized online, he bellows while beating him that the guy has been spending too much time on the internet. And who among us has not? Honestly, it’d be perfect for Cruise to break the internet, forever, as part of his character’s efforts to restore sanity. Shine on, you crazy, gone-Clear diamond — you haven’t done anything this relatable in years.

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• Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning Is a Huge Mess. But It’s a Fun Mess.