Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One director addresses choice to have AI as its villain

The director was excited about how the movie is releasing just as the AI revolution is starting. McQuarrie liked Mission: Impossible 7 to Cold War movies preying on people's fears of World War 3 and the threat of Nuclear weapons.

"When I presented it to Tom, I said, 'Two or three years ago, this idea would have been too intellectual for most people.' We would have been explaining too much of what it was and what I count on from the audience. The thing I liken it to is the Cold War," McQuarrie explains. "When I was growing up, the Cold War was very real, it was a very present thing. We were under the threat, we believed, of nuclear annihilation, that at any point, there could be a war between two or three nuclear superpowers. So when you went to see a Cold War movie, you didn't need somebody to set up the threat of the Cold War, you just felt it. It was something you brought to the movie. So my conversation with Tom was, 'What are people bringing to the movie now? They're not bringing the Cold War, they're not bringing the war on terror, they're bringing something new, and what is it? What's this anxiety?'"

Ethan Hunt will be taking on an AI weapon that threatens to wipe out humanity and faces villains from his past as he tries to keep the technology from falling into the wrong hands. Hunt will be on a globetrotting adventure as he comes to terms with his past before becoming a super spy. In Mission: Impossible 7, Hunt questions whether the mission is more important than those he cares about.

McQuarrie shares, "I felt, in the zeitgeist, this anxiety about technology and what and how technology was beginning to influence our lives, and how do we take that anxiety that the audience is bringing to the movie and give them a release? That's really what the movie boils down to. When you go to see Top Gun in 1986, the Cold War was a very real thing. That anxiety was something you were bringing to it, and you enjoyed that movie because that movie was telling you that everything was ultimately gonna be okay. You were showing them a way out."

Will AI be the perfect foe for Ethan Hunt? We will know when Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One premieres in theaters on July 12, 2023.