Dead (Scary) Mission

Ok, so he's 61 years old, but Tom Cruise still cuts a very dashing figure like he did in Top Gun. And yes, he's still fighting fit as Ethan Hunt, the rogue spy of Mission Impossible (MI) fame. I have always enjoyed the crazy mind-boggling, heart-stopping stunts which MI is known for. The latest MI 7 even ups the ante - kudos to Tom Cruise for executing them all himself, with only minimal CGI help. From furiously thrashing a tiny yellow Fiat on narrow streets, through back-alleys, up and down stone-steps, whilst handcuffed to his female side-kick to dangling from train compartments rapidly plunging off a bombed-out bridge to charging off a cliff on a motorcycle, MI 7 is truly a wild wild adventure.  Add to that.. lots of no holds barred combat on train tops, ducking tunnels and facing off 2 assassins in a narrow back-lane. It's the whole world going all out to get 1 man who is set on saving the world, which really looks like a Mission Impossible, with all the twists and turns in the plot. 

This time round, there's more interesting female protagonists to flesh out the scenes. The selfish, the good, the evil  -they are all there. And all so well-played out too. What a fitting irony to name the less than honorable thief Grace, who starts out with no qualms (and certainly no grace), confessing about making a dishonest living for herself. Just like Alanna, the White Widow, whose aim is to make friends with everybody so she can preserve her own little empire. How very like our real cut-throat world, where dog eats dog and only the fittest survive, where everyone's priority is about I, me and mine. 

But it's that very reality which makes the transformation of Grace - smart, beautiful, but still just a petty thief - so much more poignant. She is reluctantly dragged into something much bigger than herself, in a  race for 2 keys that will determine the future of the world and who will dominate it. There are 2 particularly touching scenes which I resonated with. One was when Grace wonders about Ilsa, (the female "counter-part" of Ethan), who was killed off by the villain in her place, " Am I the reason she's dead?" And Ethan's comrade Luther answers, "No, she's the reason you're alive."  What a revelation. I am alive today, in fact I am guaranteed eternal life,  because Someone died for me. The truth is 2000 years ago, Jesus Christ gave up His life willingly so that no one need perish. That's how much amazing grace God gives to a wicked world, which gets wicked-er all the time. 

I hear echoes of Jesus' heart when  Ethan swears to Grace that her life (and the lives of his friends) will always matter more to him than his own. What's more poignant is when she looks bewilderingly at him, stating the obvious "You don't even know me." And his reply "What difference does it make?" I venture Jesus would probably have said much the same thing had any human questioned His motive for coming into and saving our world. It doesn't matter to God how dishonest, selfish, bad or downright evil any human is. No one is beyond God's love or redemption. It makes no difference to God that we reject or don't believe Him. All lives matter to God; that's why He would go to the greatest extent to save all lives; through His one and only Son, Jesus Christ. Just as Ethan was (dead) serious to keep his promise to Grace, to be on that train with her somehow, because her life mattered... to him.  

Grace would have remembered Ethan's words even as she handed over the much coveted keys, watching the digital download of $10 million being transferred into her account.  In this real world too, we can very well question:  How much are we worth?  In those count-down moments, Grace underwent a literal turn-around.  She recognized she was selling her soul. In Christian terms, she was convicted. And that eventually leads to her choice to accept and be accepted as part of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF).  Our life does boil  down to making the right choice. For when the truth about our own soul hits us, we have to decide whether to get onto the only right way which God has opened up through the cross of Christ. 

As Ilsa puts it so succintly, "..the world is changing. Truth is vanishing." That's the premise of the entire show actually. And seeing it all played out can be pretty scary as MI7 takes us into a future where everything and everyone is controlled by this AI Entity,  the most fearsome state of the art killing machine ever devised, impossible to find. Imagine it knows every single thing about you, how you think and will act, from your past down to your future. Everyone's fate is written, "it knows your story and how it ends." 

It plays tricks with your mind and your eyes. This is so eerily demonstrated in the airport scenes. One minute the person is there standing in front of you, the next second, he vanishes into thin air - he was never there in the first place. People's faces are so easily superimposed interchangeably on screen. Yes, it's a movie, but  it's an obvious harbinger of what's already happening and/or to come, as even today, humans everywhere grapple with fake news by the minute and the untapped unknown implications of AI. We are already forewarned about the very real likelihood of very intelligent machines taking over our world. Quoting Christian Ious Lange: Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master. 

Interestingly Gabriel the villain is named the Dark Messiah, who “sees death as a gift he wants to share with the rest of the world.” He “can be anything, and.. knows everything,” because he is in cahoots with an all-intelligent Entity. Thankfully, in my bible, there is a real Messiah, the Anointed One - Jesus Christ, whose gift is abundant life,  who resurrected from death and walked out alive from a closed tomb. Ethan squares off to Gabriel, saying "If anything happens to them (his friends),  there’s no place that I won’t go to kill you and your g-d. That is written." Indeed there's no limit to the gods of this world. But it is already written in the Bible there is only 1 true, living God who saves to the uttermost those who would choose Him.  

As Kittridge, the CIA director says to Ethan "You need to pick a side....our lives are the sum of our choices..".  In his realistic humanistic view "Your days of fighting for the so-called greater good are over. This is our chance to control the truth, the concepts of right and wrong for everyone for centuries to come..." That's the voice of greed for ultimate power - world domination, through all means at all cost. 

But it looks like the hero's heart is still set in the right place . And mayhap this is what draws out the best in people, even overturning evil for good. As with Paris, the highly skilled, merciless female antagonist who chases Ethan all over the place,  hell-bent on her assignment to kill him. Yet because he spares her life in an alleyway duel, she reaches out to grab his hand as he loses his grip in the train that's hurtling down into sure death. And with what seems to be her dying breath, she reveals to Ethan the hiding place of the sunken submarine which holds the Entity.  Which of coz sets us up for Part 2 of Dead Reckoning, the ultimate war between a supremely intelligent force that seeks to steal, kill and destroy versus humans with hearts who still believe in honoring and protecting life. I can't wait. 

"This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men  by which we must be saved." - Acts 4:11-12

  

   

 

  

Destiny Calling

 Destiny...that's a big word, and very much open to all sorts of interpretation, depending on one's world view. And Hollywood. So how does an 80 year old Harrison Ford play it out in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, his latest and last Indy (5) adventure ?Very very well indeed. I take my hats off to this old hero - wrinkles, white hair,  flabby skin and all. 

Apparently Indy 5 is premised on a real historical artefact. National Geographic published on 6/7/2023 reported " Said by some to the world’s first computer, the Antikythera Mechanism rested at the bottom of Mediterranean for more than 2,000 years... (there really is a place called Antikythera - it's an island between mainland Greece and Crete)...its 82 fragments were once a functioning astronomical device that could predict the positions of the sun, moon, and planets." A real human - Archimedes the renowned Greek mathematician - is widely thought to have invented the technology of this device. 

Of course, Hollywood weaved real history with a heavy dose of artistic license and came up with an intriguing story of it holding the code to time travel. Throw in  a power-obsessed Nazi idealist who aims to change history by going back in time to kill and replace Hitler to win the World War. As Voller the mad scientist puts it, "Yesterday belongs to us... Whoever holds it (the dial) won’t be the King, the Emperor, or the Fuhrer. He’ll be a god." Ya, that's how crazed this villain is, and he's got a team of really bad guys to do the dirty work of killing whoever stands in his way. 

All that makes up for hard, fast and furious action that sees all sorts of chases and crashes in all sorts of vehicles across land, sea and air in real world locations . It's like whatever there is that can move - trains, cars, aeroplanes, boats, tuk-tuks - Indy's in it. There's even a horseback pursuit right in the middle of a celebration parade culminating in a subway station that really takes the cake. 

And talking about cakes, now there's new icing too -  the perfect foil to Indy : a PYT- pretty young thing - certainly not sweet, on the contrary, she packs a powerful punch - literally. Smart and brash, knows what she wants and goes all out to get it - that's Helena Shaw, Indy's god-daughter, who proclaims "Sorry, Indy. I don't do noble. Just hard maths...the only thing you can believe in is cash." Yet she still has a heart left at the end of it all. For she not only stages a fantastic rescue but brings about healing for an old man, who sees no more meaning in life. So after all the mad adrenaline-pumping scenes , it's actually the last 10 minutes of the 2 1/2 hour movie that made me cry.   

Actually the emotions had started kicking in as I watched a bored Professor Indiana Jones explaining some ancient history lesson to an even more bored audience of youngsters. What an anti-climax to making history in his hey-days. As his faithful side-kick Sallah reminisced, " I miss the desert. I miss the sea. I miss waking up every morning wondering what wonderful adventure the new day will bring us."  Indiana Jones the ultimate adventurer must have felt it every day since he put away his whip and hat to settle for a mundane teaching job. Even worse must be the grief of losing a son to war and the break-up with a wife he still loves. No wonder Indy confesses "Everything hurts." 

Obviously it wasn't just the physical aging. The most poignant heart-breaking question he threw back at Helena who was trying to convince him to return to their own time zone came in just 2 words, "For who?" The most terrible feeling in life isn't physical; it's the loneliness and hopelessness  of a life that has lost all its meaning;  that no one cares anymore anyhow anyway. 

I am sure all of us have at one time or another wished we could turn back the clock of our lives, and stay in a certain period where we have experienced the "highs" and never move on to hit the "lows". Surely we have all wished we could somehow go back to erase the mistakes, delete the wrong choices we have made along the way of living. 

Well, Indy is in such a hard place he prefers to remain in 214 BC  rather than come back to his real-life time in 1969. He is already wounded, physically and emotionally. The Siege of Syracuse is really playing out before him and hey, there's Archimedes himself in the flesh to talk to. The past is way better than his present by all appearances; he's got nothing to lose and all to gain by the looks of it. If he has to die to stay put in 214 BC, so be it. 

But that's not what his destiny is. When he asked why Helena saved him, dragging him back into 1969 , she responds so well,  "You are meant to be here, Indy." But he still can't see; he's still stuck in the "what for " mode . And then his wife walks in, looks him in the eye and asks pointedly "Are you back, Indy?" That's when the light comes back on in his darkened heart. And to complete it, his buddy Sallah  walks in too, kids in tow.   

That's destiny. We are all meant to be here today, the time and place of our "now", no matter how attractive the "then of our yesterday." We all have a "home" to return to from our wanderings, where love abides with real family and friends. 

That's the destiny a good God has ordained for all of mankind on earth - not to perish, but to be blessed with life eternal. Sin has short-circuited it; got us wandering off into all sorts of alleyways and backways, which attract and distract. But Christ came to set us back on track. And we don't need to go back 2000 years to Calvary where Jesus hung on the cross. The job was already finished there. We have a perfectly beautiful hope-filled destiny here, now and forever, one that has been prepared, was made available and is meant for all who would believe there is a heavenly Father, who's waiting for all to come home to feast at His table as His family in a new tomorrow.

 "For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope."  (Jeremiah 29:11) 

" And He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward Him and find Him. Yet He is actually not far from each one of us..." (Acts 17:26-27)