I went to see Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. I had a good time. I was amazed, I was scared, I wondered why they ruined so many scenes with so many explanations no one asked for. I missed Ilsa Faust. I got emotional. I was amazed again. I ate popcorn. I felt grateful that cinematic art still exists. I concluded that for $31.18, there is nothing bigger and more tactile than a Mission: Impossible in an IMAX theater. And yes, I also left thinking about Tom Cruise.
There’s something embarrassing about defending Tom Cruise. You know this already. You hear the name, and your brain does the three-step: Scientology, couch, center tooth. If you’re generous, you add: stunts. If you’re cruel, you go straight to “short.” But none of that quite accounts for the fact that when he runs (that ridiculous, high-kneed sprint), we root for him. Not ironically, not nostalgically. Actually. Emotionally. Against better judgment.
And the question isn’t just why. The question is why still.
Tom Cruise doesn’t just love movies. He loves making movies, which is different. It’s about labor, repetition, gravity. His career has the narrative arc of someone who misunderstood method acting and never stopped. He wants you to feel the drop, the turn, the pressure of wind on your face as a consequence of budget and obsession. He’s not acting the fall; he’s falling. For real. And because he’s doing it for you, you forgive that he’s also doing it for himself.
Cruise is the last romantic of the industrial era. Not romantic in the emotional sense—he can’t do sex anymore—but in the 19th-century sense: conquest, transcendence, man vs. limit. This is not a metaphor. He is, quite literally, always climbing something. Buildings, planes, cliffs, the abstraction of death. It’s gauche, yes. But also—deeply—an artistic impulse.
We love Cruise because he refuses the future. Not just algorithm, not just AI. Refusal is his genre. He’s allergic to digital fatigue, suspicious of irony, contemptuous of screens that do the work for you. It’s an analog ethics disguised as blockbuster spectacle. Risk, realness, ruin. He believes in them. Uncritically. Like a dog chasing a ball through traffic.
And that’s why we forgive the madness. Because in a world where “content” is used to describe both TikToks and ten-part documentaries, he still believes in movies. Not just stories. Not just arcs. Movies. Light, motion, effort. Cinema as covenant. You watch him dangle from a helicopter and remember, just briefly, that art was once a verb.
Cruise isn’t cinema’s future. He’s the ghost of its body. And like all ghosts, he insists on being seen.