The New em Mission: Impossible /em Reveals That the Franchise Has Always Had an Unlikely Big Bad

Over the course of the six movies and nearly 30 years leading up to this one, Mission: Impossible's Ethan Hunt has fought double agents and shadowy terrorist networks, scaled skyscrapers, and thrown himself out of planes. But he's never fought an adversary like the Entity, the rogue artificial intelligence he takes on in Dead Reckoning Part One. For one thing, it has no physical form, which means Tom Cruise can't catch it no matter how fast he runs. And for another, the Entity doesn't just want to defeat Ethan: It wants to replace him. In a briefing of the U.S. top intelligence officials in which exposition is passed from one actor to the next like a red-hot baton, one alphabet-agency higher-up describes the Entity as a "godless, stateless, amoral" being that can infiltrate any system in the world--not unlike the Impossible Mission Force itself, which, though nominally a branch of the U.S. government, doesn't take orders from the military-industrial complex so much as consider its suggestions.