History has shown that it’s never a good idea for a big budget blockbuster to start shooting without an ending locked in place, but one benefit Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two has is the presence of Academy Award-winning screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie as director.
As a scribe, the filmmaker has either penned, contributed to, or polished countless projects and made them substantially better as a result, so production kicking off on the second half of his latest collaboration with Tom Cruise in spite of a conclusion not being settled on isn’t as much of a concern as it would be if we were talking about something like a comic book movie.
Another plus – even if it’s an unfortunate one at that – is the ongoing strike action will give the key creatives the chance to sit back, take stock, and try and come up with a finale that befits the spectacular Part One, even if McQuarrie is legally forbidden from putting pen to paper until the situation resolves itself.
Playing coy is one of the favored tricks every big name in Hollywood loves to pull out of the bag whenever they’re being questioned about a hotly-anticipated feature, but McQuarrie was adamant when speaking to Collider that he really has no clue how Part Two is going to resolve itself.
“I don’t know what the ending of Part Two is, so I couldn’t tell you. I’m not being evasive. I could tell you that I know what the end of Part Two is, but I can’t guarantee that that will be the ending when we get there. Tom and I never obsess about executing the plan. We always have a direction, we always have a place we’re going. In our trying to describe the process, in retrospect, it sounds as though what we do is just flying by the seat of our pants and making it up as we go along.
That’s not an accurate description. You are definitely flying in a direction, you’re definitely prepared. You couldn’t be that cavalier without somebody getting seriously physically hurt. These things are planned within an inch of their life. Along the way, we see a shiny object and go for it.”
Cruise and McQuarrie haven’t given us a reason to doubt them yet, and having avoided the infuriating cliffhanger trope in Part One, there’s no reason to doubt that its immediate successor won’t do the exact same thing and leave audiences the world over thrilled with the end result.