Today, though, I'm using it in reference to film franchises, even ones that say they are ending.
My first movie on my final of three flights back to Australia -- the first of those less than an hour from the island of Crete to the Greek mainland -- was the final movie in the Mission: Impossible series, so final it actually has the word "final" in the title: Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. In the end, I do agree that's better than Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 2.
And I suppose I am going to have to SPOIL this movie in order to talk about it today, so this is your fair warning of that.
I guess all we really know is that Tom Cruise does not intend to make any more Mission: Impossible movies. Or do we even know that? I think we know that. There could still be Mission: Impossible movies that don't involve Ethan Hunt, or involve a young, rebooted version of him. In fact, there will almost surely be that, eventually.
The reason we might not know whether it's Cruise's final M:I is that this movie leaves him, and essentially all of his team, very much intact to just make another movie in another two years.
I say "essentially" all of his team because there is, indeed, one "important" casualty from within that team. And I put that "important" in quotation marks because I would argue that Ving Rhames' Luther has been essentially an extra character for a couple movies now, showing up because Rhames is still alive (he's only 66, which puts him just three years older than Cruise) and because he is a likable screen presence, not because he is a crucial ingredient to Hunt's team. (And I'm not here to argue how crucial the tech whiz is, because I'm sure he's been a key component each time they've saved the world. I'm speaking narratively. To be honest, I can't properly remember/defend the narrative choices from what I'm calling the "Rebecca Ferguson years," which are also the years when Christopher McQuarrie made himself the final definitive auteur on a series whose first four entries were never directed by the same person twice.)
This movie easily could have involved more of a dismantling of Ethan's team, as it seems at the very least that Ethan's own body parts should have been dismantled in a fall from a plane that involved the clear burning up of one parachute and the unclear existence of a backup parachute. But it does not.
Instead, the final scene shows Ethan in the busy Trafalgar Square, where he's flanked by team members, each symbolically appearing at some reasonable distance from him, where he can see them but they aren't right next to him, like secret service agents. It is a symbolic display rather than a moment of any narrative realism, meant to indicate that they still have Ethan's back. Having clocked their presence and shown his appreciation with a slight nod of his head, Ethan then disappears into the crowd, the final indication that he's back in the wind, as he has been for almost 30 years now. (You get the feeling this movie wishes it had come out a year later and just made it an even 30.)
Essentially, then, not really any difference from the ending of any other M:I movie, unless that movie was clearly designed as a cliffhanger. (Which I think Dead Reckoning was? I don't remember.)
It's quite different, you will agree, from how they "ended" (again, only temporary) cinema's most enduring spy franchise, the James Bond franchise, a few years ago.
When I saw this ending, I thought of how we as human beings -- and me specifically as one specific human being -- don't like to depart from a friend or family member without establishing, even vaguely, the next time we will see each other.
When that exact moment of parting arrives, you become acutely acquainted with life's finalities. Some people you part from, you will never see again -- you just don't know who, or when. Surely, you expect to see all your close friends, and all your young enough family members, again, many times more depending on geographical proximity. But take my uncle, married to my dad's sister, who we saw this (American) summer at our family reunion in Georgia. I had not seen him since our wedding in 2008, and he had a stroke a couple years ago. There's a good chance I won't see him again, but of course I could not say or even suggest that when we parted. In fact, I think I said that now that we know a reunion like this is possible, we should do it again sooner rather than later. Always a prudent gesture, especially under these particular circumstances.
To get out of the personal and go back to this movie, Tom Cruise can't seem to accept the symbolic death of Ethan Hunt as he completes what we understand to be the final of eight Mission: Impossible movies, so he just bows out with a "see you later," an indication this really could just land anywhere within the total continuity of the series.
And that's fairly smart from the perspective of making movies. It's a good bet hedge.
What if Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is like the highest grossing movie of all time? It wasn't, for the record. In fact, it failed to even crack $200 million domestically, which is likely not how they'd hoped to go out at all. Maybe audiences finally said "Enough, already."
But let's say it had performed how they hoped. Wouldn't there be a part of Cruise -- who at 63 can still clearly do all the stunts -- who would want to come back and make Mission: Impossible - The Really Final Reckoning - Really? And wouldn't it also make good sense to leave that one open-ended?
On the subject of whether you should ever really say goodbye or not, let's not forget that the Friday the 13th franchise made what it called The Final Chapter more than 40 years ago, in 1984. There have since been eight more films in the franchise. Like I've said on many occasions before, franchises never end -- they only hibernate until it is opportune to come back out into the sun.
And who, at the start, would have thought that Mission: Impossible would be such a franchise?
At the start, it seemed little different in aspired longevity than something like 1998's The Avengers, which I happened to watch on my last international trip back in July, the one referenced earlier in this piece -- though I'm sure they would have loved it if that one could have turned into a 30-year franchise as well. Both were big screen versions of TV shows that peaked in the 1960s, though M:I spilled into the 1970s while The Avengers was contained almost perfectly within that decade. The Avengers ran for one year longer, actually, 1961 to 1969 vs. 1966 to 1973.
Yet on the strength of Cruise's movie stardom and one memorable scene of dropping from the ceiling into a highly secure facility, a franchise was born to rival the all-time greats in terms of its endurance ... one we are pretty sure is not actually over, only just going into a temporary state of hibernation.
And so it is that I'll not say goodbye, only "see you later," to Mission: Impossible, and honestly, not very wistfully. The McQuarrie films have not really done it for me -- and by that I don't mean they are not useful pieces of entertainment. They just never fully grabbed me, such that I can say this last one might actually be my favorite, even though I slapped it with the indignity of a plane watch when I was already delirious from lack of sleep. (The first one without Rebecca Ferguson? Funny, I do think of myself as liking her, but maybe her function specifically within this franchise never worked for me.)
No, I'm a Ghost Protocol guy. I think that had something to do with the mythology I built up over the Burj Khalifa, which finally got its proper outlet when I visited and went to the top of that building on this past trip. I also do like J.J. Abrams' Mission: Impossible III and have a limited fondness for the first, though John Woo's was pretty terrible.
Anyway, I think it's fair to say we have, indeed, seen the last of Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt. Ethan Hunt himself? Well, he'll probably outlive me.
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