The Big Picture
- Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One introduces a unique AI villain for Ethan Hunt and his team to face, portrayed as a digital pulsating circle with blue light.
- Director Christopher McQuarrie tweaked the AI's design to avoid it resembling the Eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings, changing its color from red to blue.
- The director aimed to show the Entity as an all-attentive antagonist, studying everything in the room and possessing a hunger and searching quality.
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One does something distinctly different with the long-running action franchise, by bringing in a villain that's altogether new for Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt and his faithful band of IMF agents to contend with: Artificial intelligence.
The concept of AI as a villain in films, particularly sci-fi, is not a new concept, but it does pose something of a conundrum for filmmakers when it comes to portraying them on screen. After all, how do you portray an invisible enemy in a way that can be interacted with. You can give them a body, like in Avengers: Age of Ultron, or maybe give it a voice. But for director Christopher McQuarrie, there was a need to ensure we could see the villain, named The Entity in the movie, and understand where and when it was at all times.
The Entity takes on the form of a digital circle that pulsates, resembling an eye, with blue light shining from it. It's effective, particularly during a nightclub scene in Venice set up by the Entity itself. But as McQuarrie has revealed to Empire, the original design of the AI had to be tweaked after some friends and family pointed out that the villain looked like it might be looking for Hobbits, not Hunt.
The Great Eye
“The graphic of the Entity was originally red. And I gave it this twitchy eye movement. People in an earlier friends and family screening said, ‘It was like the Eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. And I thought, ‘Well, no, it's not, because the Eye of Sauron doesn't move.’ In my mind's eye, it was extremely static, but on a rewatch of the films, I realised they were correct, so I simply changed the eye from red to blue. I brought out the blue in all the white spectrum of those projections, and suddenly there it was – the Entity was everywhere.”
What was vital for the director, however, was correctly showing the Entity's personality and behaviour. McQuarrie wanted to make sure it wasn't just staring at you, it was staring at everything, assessing and scanning not just one person, but the entire room.
“What I wanted was something that wasn't looking just in your eyes – it was studying your face, it's looking around the room, it's studying everything around you. It's hungry, it's searching. It's not inattentive, but it's all-attentive.”
Dead Reckoning Part One is still playing in theaters. Part Two will be out in June 2024.
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Chris McQuarrie Altered 'Mission: Impossible's Villain to Avoid 'Lord ... - Collider
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