✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

The Last Useful Man

substack.com · 3,162 words · saved by 1 readers

About halfway through Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise goes for a run on a treadmill. The treadmill is on the USS Ohio, a submarine manned exclusively by implausibly attractive people. One of those people is not who they seem: a cultist, radicalized by the Entity, the film’s AI antagonist. The cultist sneaks up behind Cruise and lunges with a knife. Things look dicey for a moment — until Cruise gains some distance and kicks him repeatedly in the head. While doing so, he imparts a few words of wisdom: “You spend too much time on the internet.” What divides the heroes and villains in Final Reckoning is simple: the villains have to Google things, and the heroes do not. There are three bad guys, more or less. First, the Entity, a rogue AI halfway through its plan for global domination. Second, Gabriel, the Entity’s meat puppet. Third, a gang of surprisingly likable Russians who take Cruise’s team hostage in a house in Alaska. What unites the villains isn’t malice so mu

Film & Television The Last Useful Man On Tom Cruise and the Case for Embodied Knowledge Aled Maclean-Jones and The Metropolitan Review Dec 03, 2025 1,705 85 361 Share Tom Cruise on the Set of Top Gun, 1986, Photograph, Getty Images About halfway through Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning , Tom Cruise goes for a run on a treadmill. The treadmill is on the USS Ohio , a submarine manned exclusively by implausibly attractive people. One of those people is not who they seem: a cultist, radicalized by the Entity, the film’s AI antagonist. The cultist sneaks up behind Cruise and lunges with a

Explore this link on the map →

saved by

related reading