Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning in 4K Edition

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is the eighth chapter of a saga that, at least in part, resonates as a kind of testament to modern action cinema. The film operates on a dual register: on one side, pure spectacle, then there's the surprisingly lucid reflection on our relationship with truth, technology, and the myth of the hero.

The film picks up immediately after the events of Dead Reckoning: Ethan Hunt and his team confront the Entity, an artificial intelligence capable of manipulating data, sounds, and images, generating a distorted reality impossible to unmask. An invisible and omnipresent enemy whose power is to rewrite the very perception of the world and a threat that couldn't be more contemporary.

Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning - (Im)possible encyclopedia of the franchise

Christopher McQuarrie directs and co-writes (with Erik Jendresen) a film that pushes more towards total excess, an operation of closure and at the same time rebirth. The plot is deliberately labyrinthine and full of references to the entire saga, with flashbacks and dialogues loaded with explanations. A choice that, at least in the first part, weighs down the pace and risks stifling the narrative impact, especially for those who haven't followed Hunt's adventures entirely. The desire is to tie up all the loose ends of the past before taking the definitive leap, but in doing so, details, events, and characters accumulate, saturating attention. The film takes almost half an hour to find a direction, managing at least in part to capture attention as in the past.

Tom Cruise is an actor, co-producer, and more than ever embodies Ethan Hunt: an archetype, a symbol of physical and artisanal cinema that doesn't surrender to age and CGI, who puts his all at the service of spectacle and the audience. He has always stated that if the stunt is real, you feel it, and the involvement becomes exponential. Seeing him defy physics by “walking” on a flying biplane or diving into icy waters is not just another act of professional madness, but a declaration of love for cinema as a concrete, tangible, and above all unsimulated experience.

Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning - No CGI and adrenaline-pumping stunts

A living legend of stunts alongside Jackie Chan, a duo in antithesis to cinema steeped in digital immateriality. Almost 170 minutes of embrace with the immense audience who began to follow the footsteps of MIF agent no. 1, starting from the decent first film directed by Brian De Palma, who passed the baton to John Woo, then J.J. Abrams, Brad Bird, and finally McQuarrie.

The Final Reckoning is not the best in the saga; the personal memory of this writer is linked to a more fluid and overwhelming narrative like in the third film, the one with a very evil Philip Seymour Hoffman and the “Rabbit's Foot,” another piece that returns to complete the whole. This latest adventure features a heroic underwater feat that risks eliciting more of a smile than stirring adrenaline. A grand finale that, if it had had a few fewer fireworks, might have been less confusing and more digestible.

Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning - How it looks

Filmed almost entirely digitally at native 4K/6K resolution and limitedly 35 mm (Arri Alexa Mini LF, Panavision Panaflex Millennium XL2 negative 500ASA, Sony CineAlta Venice and Venice Rialto, Z CAM E2-F), with an image format almost entirely 2.39:1 (3840 x 2160/23.97p, HEVC on triple-layer BD-100) with some IMAX 1.90:1 sequences, which we find here. The overall picture of the work is stunning, with some rare passages where the amount of grain visibly increases, such as when Ethan puts on the mask in the “digital sarcophagus” and finds himself face to face with the Entity.

The visions that assail his gaze and that of the spectators leave the sensation of a slight loss of solidity. For the rest, the native 4K master from which the encoding started delivers a great involvement, with an extra boost for 10-bit panels (OLED) and Dolby Vision. In this sense, the fidelity of light points and colors improves, with deep blacks.

Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning - How it sounds

The audio offering is at least identical for Italian on both the 4K and 2K discs, which contain the 169 minutes of the film: Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps), which is listenable even on a Home Theater system, but there are frequent occasions to feel the lack of a sound presence of greater depth and breadth.

The English Dolby TrueHD 7.1.4 channel with ATMOS objects (16 bit) steps up in level but does not reach the reference zone; it amps up the tension and action, but the feeling is that it could have given even more. Among the many thrilling moments are certainly Hunt's crazy biplane flight and the incursion into the Sebastopol submarine during its slide into the abyss. It's also probable that the USA disc has a louder voice, given its 24-bit resolution track.

Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning - The extras

Bulk of the extras on a dedicated BD-25.

Audio Commentary 1 - Director Chris McQuarrie is joined by Ethan Hunt himself, Tom Cruise, for a lively and informative commentary that covers the entire range of the production. Cruise's participation is crucial, as he offers much more intriguing insights into his character and his stunt work. The commentary also gives credit to the co-stars and crew.

Audio Commentary 2 - Christopher McQuarrie, editor Eddie Hamilton, and editor Mary Boulding offer a more technical discussion, moving away from anecdotes and delving into the numerous processes that brought the film to life.

Behind-the-scenes featurette of the production (18 minutes) - Followed by 5 focuses on set and on location: filming the biplane sequence, inside the underwater scene, on set in Svalbard, through the mine, and the soundtrack.

Edited deleted scenes (10 minutes) with optional commentary by McQuarrie. The filming at Olifants River Canyon and the biplane transfer sequence (13 minutes) with optional commentary by McQuarrie and Cruise. Isolated audio track of the soundtrack (DD 5.1, 640 kbps), 4 promotional spots, and 4 photo galleries, one of which is dedicated to Tom Cruise, with an “old-school Home Video” biography only in English. Collector's Steelbook.