Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning looks like it will finally answer one of the franchise’s oldest mysteries. The Mission: Impossible series is almost 30 years old and yet, unlike some other franchises, it has largely only gotten better with each film. The stakes continue to get raised, the stunts are increasingly more dangerous, and the relationships at the core of the film have only gotten stronger. It’s a series that delivers repeated thrills and for the most part, you can enter each movie without much knowledge of previous movies. However, it appears that Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning may require some homework if you want to get the most out of its story.
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While the creative team behind the upcoming action movie has been coy about the idea that this is the end of the series, it certainly seems like Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning is the end for Ethan Hunt. The title seems to imply it, Tom Cruise is in his 60s, and the scale of the movie seems to be comparable to a big finale. With that said, both trailers for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning indicate that a lot of the movie will be about the “sum” of Ethan’s choices and the latest trailer specifically highlights key moments from previous adventures. However, one particular film seemed to be referenced more than the rest.
Mission: Impossible 8 May Finally Reveal What the Rabbit’s Foot Is
Across all of the footage in the most recent trailer for the new Mission: Impossible film, Mission: Impossible 3 came up a lot, and potentially more than you realize. The stunt where Ethan Hunt leaps off a skyscraper in the Shanghai is featured in the trailer alongside a literal blink and you’ll miss it shot of Ethan being interrogated by the film’s villain, Owen Davian. However, the shot from the trailer that stands out the most is the one of Ethan Hunt obtaining the Rabbit’s Foot, a mysterious biological weapon that Davian is after.
Mission: Impossible 3 frequently poses just how dangerous the Rabbit’s Foot is and how catastrophic it would be if it were set loose, but never actually tells the audience what it would do. Is it a bomb? A virus? Something beyond our comprehension? Just how much damage could it do? We have no idea. That’s thanks to director J.J. Abrams, who has a storytelling technique that he refers to as the “Mystery Box.”
The Mystery Box technique is all about creating a really elusive and interesting mystery that builds in the audience’s mind, but the movie may never actually resolve it by the end. The idea is that the mystery is more powerful than the answer, similar to how sometimes seeing a scary monster in a horror movie isn’t as scary as what your mind might imagine based on more vague details like sound or less obvious visuals.
However, it appears that Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie may finally bring things full circle with Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning by bringing the Rabbit’s Foot back into the picture. The shot of the bioweapon in the trailers is not from Mission: Impossible 3, though it does seem to be a flashback to unseen moments from the 2006 sequel. It appears that this flashback will reveal what happened when Ethan snuck into the Chinese lab to retrieve the Rabbit’s Foot, as he has his shorter haircut and black stealth gear from the third movie.
It seems incredibly unlikely the team behind The Final Reckoning would go to great lengths to take us back to Mission: Impossible 3, a particularly divisive movie among fans, and highlight the Rabbit’s Foot if it didn’t play a significant role in the events of this movie. We know that Ethan will be contending with the all-powerful AI known as The Entity once again in this movie, but we don’t really know what its plan is. It doesn’t seem out of the question that The Entity or its allies would want to leverage a powerful superweapon like the Rabbit’s Foot in this big finale to the franchise.
Last we saw of the device, it was in the custody of the IMF. Is it still there? Will it be stolen? All will likely be revealed very soon, but McQuarrie and Cruise will likely tell us exactly what Rabbit’s Foot is this time around. A big critique of Mission: Impossible 3 is telling viewers they should be scared of this weapon, but fans don’t know exactly why or how scared they should be. This is a series that routinely threatens nuclear attacks, so how much worse could it be? Hopefully we will find out this time, especially since the recent trailer highlights missile launches and large scale destruction, though that could be totally misleading – which is very in-character for this twisty franchise.
What do you think the Rabbit’s Foot is? Let me know in the comments!
