Christopher McQuarrie explains why major character needed to die in ‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One director Christopher McQuarrie has explained why a major character needed to die in the film.
In a new interview with Empire, McQuarrie and Tom Cruise discussed why they felt it was right to kill off Rebecca Ferguson’s character Ilsa Faust, who had been in the franchise since 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.
“We knew that that emotional arc was of a certain emotional tone… Ilsa is a wonderful character, and a character of which I am enormously proud, and Rebecca is an actor of such unmitigated power and presence,” the director said.
“And yet, where we had gone with the character from Rogue to Fallout…[the] place you took that character would either make less of her, it would suddenly become frivolous,” he added. “Or she would just become a romantic interest, and it was never about creating a character who was defined by her love story with Ethan Hunt.”
He continued: “Their relationship transcends a traditional loving story… They’re doomed to be together and yet doomed never to be together… It felt like that story was looking for its resolution and so we said this has got to happen.”
“What really needs to happen in the story is the stakes have to be real, they can’t be implied,” he added. “We have to have the courage to let [Ethan] fail and it has to cost, the mission has to cost, and without that, the villain simply will not have a threat…what you’re seeing in the escalation of the story is what it costs Ethan personally in Venice.”
Far Out gave the film a disappointed two-and-a-half star review, citing its tackling of AI as a threat as too simplistic for what it tries to achieve: “The ‘prescience’ in Dead Reckoning is about as clairvoyant as a terrible episode of the original Star Trek. In fact, it’s even dumber, which makes it all the worse considering it’s nearly 70 years later. The complexities of artificial intelligence, which we’re still barely even comprehending, aren’t even remotely explored in this new movie. There’s little to no probing of the implications of computer sentience whatsoever; it’s simply ‘AI bad. Hunt must kill’.“
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