In 1992, Richard Slotkin published the final instalment in his trilogy of tomes chronicling the history of the United States.
Gunfighter Nation, the last book, primarily focuses on the gunslinging times of the American frontier. Slotkin uses the book to examine the myth of cowboys and the American West. The “How the West Was Won” rhetoric that places cowboys as great American heroes winning their land, is a story hiding the bloodier and darker truth of the massacre of large populations of indigenous populations across the US.
Where it used to be cowboys, the modern American myth now has Tom Cruise at its centre as the President of Movies, in his last outing as Mission: Impossible’s Ethan Hunt.
The human psyche of cowboy movies
In Gunfighter Nation, Slotkin rounds off his history of the US by demonstrating how the cowboy myth and stories of this time reflect present-day ideologies. Through Western films beginning with the likes of Stagecoach in the 1930s, to Sergio Leonne’s genre-defining Dollars trilogy in the 60s, and continuing to Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven in the 1990s, Slotkin shows that the genre can be used as a historical artifact of the time.
Slotkin writes that at the time Vietnam War, amid the decline of American exceptionalism, westerns like Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch became bloodier and more violent, forcing viewers at home to question whether violence against the perceived “enemy” was all for the good cause.
After the end of the war, as people began to reflect and face what had happened in the conflict, the Western genre became more psychological. This is shown best in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. The film takes a darker look at the genre and shows the aftermath and psychological toll violence can take on a person.
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By GlobalDataMission: Impossible and external threats
Westerns are few and far between in the modern age of cinema. Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland and The Rider, or John Maclean’s Slow West are quieter takes on the genre, placing unconventional leads at the heart of the film.
What are not few and far between in modern cinema is Mission: Impossible films. If Westerns can show us the history of the human psyche, the Mission: Impossible series can demonstrate to us the external threats taking up the thoughts of populations.
Mission: Impossible after the cold war
The first Mission: Impossible film was released in 1996. Inspired by the 1960s television show of the same name, the first four films in the series came somewhat infrequently, with a new director taking on the franchise each time. This gave a smaller-scale, episodic feeling to the franchise.
The first film directed by Brian de Palma was a departure from the other action films of the 90s like Independence Day that presented scenes of whole-world decimation and instead took a stripped-back approach, ending in a simple heist. The 90s was the first post-Cold War decade and many films, like Heat, took a smaller-scale approach, removing threats from outside the country and instead focusing on internal ideological struggles and government accountability.
In this vein, in the first film, the Jon Voight character of Jim Phelps was a callback to one of the original lead heroes of the TV show. But the film turned him into a key antagonist, flipping the script on who you can trust.
Mission: Impossible in the age of AI
Mission: Impossible III was the first film released following 9/11 and began to tackle real-world politics like the supply of deadly arms from America to other parties. Later, as the franchise continued, it began to explore the limits of technology. The films have become known for their use of realistic face masks and voice augmentation, a physical precursor to what artificial intelligence can do in the virtual world.
Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning and Final Reckoning, the final instalments in the franchise, handle the two-part story of The Entity. The Entity is an omniscient and omnipresent AI tool that is slowly imbedding itself across the nuclear powers of the world and bringing a doomsday-esque cult along with it.
AI is unavoidable in modern life. It is embedded in internet searches and phone software. While an omnipresent AI like The Entity isn’t around just yet, there have been reports as recently as May 2025 of a ChatGPT model that refused to shut down after it had been instructed to do so. As AI evolves and learns, something akin to The Entity is never far from most people’s minds.
Within its filmmaking, Final Reckoning takes an anti-AI approach. Tom Cruise is known for his death-defying stunts and this time around he can be seen jumping between two flying planes with just a thin wire in the sky to support him. Cruise’s demand for realism and practical stunts in all his films pushes back on the industry’s reliance on green screens and technology, instead presenting a real person performing a real stunt. Similarly, an extended sequence in a submarine is done as practically as it can, but is also almost entirely silent, perhaps stretching the dwindling attention spans of modern viewers in the age of social media.
A mirror image of society
Like Westerns in the last age of Hollywood, the Mission: Impossible films hold a mirror to contemporary psyches, whether that be post-Cold War ideological struggles with government accountability, issues with selling arms to external parties, or AI.
Like Clint Eastwood and John Wayne before him, Tom Cruise will be vital for future historians trying to decipher the threats that faced modern society between the 1990s and the 2020s.
