Warning: a huge SPOILER from Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One is about to be discussed. If you want to avoid ruining this latest IMF mission, you’ve been warned.
Some huge swings make up the story that co-writer/director Christopher McQuarrie has set to to tell across his next two Tom Cruise-led blockbusters. With Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning - Part One acting as the big setup, some large choices had to be made to get things underway. For the longtime steward of this Paramount-based franchise, the gravity of the situation was best conveyed through the death of one of Ethan Hunt’s most valued team members. It's a death I’m still pretty mad about, if I’m being completely honest.
I am, of course, talking about Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust, who gave her life valiantly in combat engaging Dead Reckoning villain Gabriel (Esai Morales) in hand-to-hand combat. During a chat on one of Empire’s podcasts (via EW), McQuarrie admitted that as early as the production of Top Gun: Maverick, he and Tom Cruise were discussing this huge moment. In the middle of that conversation came the rationale for sacrificing Ilsa, which, according to the filmmaker, went something like this:
We knew that that emotional arc was of a certain emotional tone... Ilsa is a wonderful character, and a character of which I am enormously proud, and Rebecca is an actor of such unmitigated power and presence. … What really needs to happen in the story is the stakes have to be real, they can't be implied. We have to have the courage to let [Ethan] fail and it has to cost, the mission has to cost, and without that, the villain simply will not have a threat…what you're seeing in the escalation of the story is what it costs Ethan personally in Venice.
Stakes are definitely important when you’re dropping a purposefully-constructed two-part Mission: Impossible epic as the seventh and eighth entries of a franchise. This series can’t merely rely on throwing Tom Cruise into dangerous real-life stunts to keep the energy up. Sometimes our hero needs to lose someone to make it all feel real, and in this case, Rebecca Ferguson’s Rogue Nation standout was the one on the chopping block.
Quite frankly, I think you could have still had a sacrifice in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, while also having Ilsa along for the ride. Hayley Atwell’s Grace could have been lost in that very same sequence, and it would have served the same purpose and created a greater shock.
With the guilt for losing Marie (Mariela Garriga) at the beginning of Ethan Hunt's IMF journey still nagging at him, losing Atwell’s newbie would have been even more tragic. Former MI:6 operative Ilsa signed up for this life, where as professional thief Grace didn't, which technically makes her a relatively innocent party.
My opinion aside, Christopher McQuarrie went into deeper detail into the specifics of Ilsa’s selection for extinction. While I still don’t think Ms. Faust needed to die, this deeper explanation does go quite far when hammering home why this “had to happen.” According to McQuarrie, here’s the ultimate purpose of Ilsa Faust’s Mission: Impossible demise:
And yet, where we had gone with the character from Rogue to Fallout...[the] place you took that character would either make less of her, it would suddenly become frivolous... or she would just become a romantic interest, and it was never about creating a character who was defined by her love story with Ethan Hunt. Their relationship transcends a traditional loving story... They're doomed to be together and yet doomed never to be together. ... It felt like that story was looking for its resolution and so we said this has got to happen.
I’m not the only person who saw Ilsa’s death as a major Dead Reckoning Part One misstep, as our own Jessica Rawden voiced her concerns with that moment in a more longform manner. Sadly, what’s done is done, and Ilsa is now probably resting in the same limbo that Marie and even Kristen Scott Thomas’ Sarah Davies occupy in Ethan Hunt’s tortured psyche. I see the reasoning and I get the dramatic weight of what was done, but I still don't have to like it.
Of course, there's still room for more details to flesh out this heinous act. How that gambit pays off in the end will be decided in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two, which currently sits on the 2024 movie schedule with its June 28th debut. In the meantime, you can revisit Dead Reckoning Part One while it's still playing in theaters.
