Mission: Impossible – Fallout puts Ethan Hunt in a position the series had mostly avoided: forced to choose, in front of the audience, between one life and millions. The film is a 2018 American action spy film, runs 147 minutes, and was written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Tom Cruise leads an ensemble that includes Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris, Angela Bassett, Vanessa Kirby, Michelle Monaghan, and Alec Baldwin. It is the sequel to Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and the sixth installment in the Mission: Impossible film series.
Trailer, via Paramount Pictures.
Two Years After Solomon Lane
The setup is plain. Solomon Lane, the rogue British agent played by Sean Harris, was captured two years earlier. His network, the Syndicate, has reorganized as the Apostles, a terror-for-hire group. They are recruited by an extremist calling himself John Lark to acquire three plutonium cores for nuclear bombs he will use to dismantle the existing world order.
Ethan Hunt fails to recover the cores in Berlin. The Apostles take Luther Stickell hostage, and Ethan chooses to save Luther instead. The cores get away. Ethan, Luther, and teammate Benji Dunn then capture Lark’s nuclear weapons specialist, Nils Delbruuk, and trick him into providing schematics for Lark’s bombs.
Angela Bassett Wants Ethan Watched
CIA director Erika Sloane, played by Angela Bassett, confronts Ethan and IMF secretary Alan Hunley — Alec Baldwin, back from Rogue Nation — over the failure. She insists on sending her own agent, August Walker, along. Henry Cavill plays Walker as a burly, ruthless CIA assassin. Sloane’s instruction to him is to consider anyone expendable.
Ethan and Walker make a high-altitude, low-opening jump over Paris and infiltrate a nightclub where Lark is meant to buy the cores from arms broker Alanna Mitsopolis. They approach a man they believe is Lark. The fight that follows, in a men’s restroom, ends when an ally steps in.
Rebecca Ferguson Kills a Man to Save Ethan
Ilsa Faust, the MI6 agent played by Rebecca Ferguson, intervenes in that fight and kills the man to save Ethan. Ferguson’s contract on Rogue Nation included an option clause that let the studio commit her to a sequel. She has said she enjoyed portraying a strong woman and embraced performing her own stunts when possible. She was pregnant during early filming of Fallout while also shooting scenes for The Kid Who Would Be King.
Ethan then assumes Lark’s identity and meets Mitsopolis — Vanessa Kirby, playing a high-level European arms broker and con artist known as the White Widow. She gives him one core and explains the rest will come after he attacks a police convoy and frees its prisoner: Lane.
The Truck, the Seine, and the Real Lark
Walker hands Sloane material that points to Ethan as the genuine Lark. Ethan goes off plan anyway. He drives the truck holding Lane into the Seine, a move meant to shield the police escort from Mitsopolis’s mercenaries. He draws the police away while Benji and Luther take Lane into custody, and he stops an attempt on Lane’s life.
A 33-Page Script and a Broken Ankle
McQuarrie wrote a script that ran only 33 pages, serving as an outline driven primarily by the interesting filming locations. That allowed for improvisation and significant changes to scenes throughout the shoot. Principal photography began in April 2017 on a $178–180 million budget, starting in Paris and continuing to London, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Arab Emirates by early 2018. Filming was delayed for several months after Cruise broke his ankle during a stunt, significantly inflating the budget.
A pay dispute also stalled pre-production. Cruise wanted more than the $11–13 million he received for The Mummy and wanted gross points — a percentage of the initial box office gross received by Paramount and Skydance before disbursements to other financial partners. The dispute began in August 2016, was resolved by September, and pushed filming back several months from January 2017.
McQuarrie intended Fallout to better explore Ethan’s character and emotions. He believed earlier entries had left Ethan primarily a cipher for audiences, and he wanted to test the limits of Ethan’s abilities, morality, and personal relationships.
The Recurring Villain and the Returning Ex-Wife
Sean Harris had initially wanted Solomon Lane to die in Rogue Nation but returned for Fallout, becoming the series’ first recurring villain. McQuarrie and Cruise had determined that killing Lane was not the right choice for Rogue Nation.
Michelle Monaghan was confirmed to join the cast in June 2017, reprising her role as Julia for the first time in seven years. Julia is a doctor and Ethan’s ex-wife who went into hiding from his enemies. Wes Bentley plays Erik, Julia’s fellow doctor and husband.
What Fallout Gets Right, and What It Costs
The action is the best the series has staged, and the reason is not scale. It is that every set piece has a person inside it who has already been established as worth saving. The Berlin choice, the restroom fight, the Seine — each one is a decision, not a spectacle.
The cost is length. At 147 minutes, Fallout carries more plot than it needs, and the middle stretch of identity-swapping — Ethan as Lark, Walker as accuser, Mitsopolis as broker — asks the audience to hold more threads than the emotional throughline requires. The film’s best material is almost all physical and almost all wordless.
Here is the part worth watching. The franchise spent five films treating Ethan Hunt as a competent man in a series of traps. Fallout treats him as a man with a stated moral position, and then makes that position expensive. Sloane’s order to Walker — consider anyone expendable — is the exact opposite of how Ethan operates, and the film knows it.
Cavill is the right piece of casting for it. He plays Walker as a wall, and the film uses his size against Cruise’s. Ferguson remains the series’ most valuable supporting player. Kirby’s White Widow is a small part that lands hard enough to leave the door open.
The ranking of the series’ best entries, by what Fallout establishes:
- Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) — the first to make Ethan’s morality the plot.
- Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) — introduced Ilsa Faust and Lane.
- The earlier entries — competent, but Ethan stayed a cipher.
The film’s real bet is that an audience will accept a hero whose competence keeps failing because his conscience keeps winning. That bet holds. Fallout is not a better spy plot than its predecessors. It is a better character film than they were, and it earns its runtime in the last act.
KEY FACTS
- Title: Mission: Impossible – Fallout
- Year: 2018
- Director and writer: Christopher McQuarrie
- Runtime: 147 minutes
- Budget: $178–180 million
- Script length: 33 pages
- Principal photography began: April 2017
- Score: 8.7/10
McQuarrie is the series’ first returning director. Fallout’s 33-page outline, its 147-minute runtime and its $178–180 million budget are the numbers that matter: a loose script, a long cut and a big bill, all three driven by the same set pieces. The rest is a franchise learning to let its hero lose something.
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