LE MONDE'S OPINION – MUST SEE

It is once again on the Cannes Croisette that Tom Cruise returns – with the first part of the diptych in 2023 – to the Reckoning bike for another lap, the eighth impossible mission since 1996. The stakes of the previous installment, Dead Reckoning, will be recapped for those in the back who prefer gaming on their phones to life-size live action. A doomsday scenario is brewing, all the more frightening as a malicious artificial intelligence (AI), cold as death, has replaced the cohort of more or less frantic terrorists that populate the series. Its goal: to eradicate the human race by taking control of its weapons of mass destruction.

The bluish magma that represents said AI, also known as the Entity, is accompanied by a human accomplice, Gabriel (Esai Morales) – a fallen archangel, it must be recalled – who is completely subservient but offers the advantage of a more cinematic presence. The mission, therefore, consists of Ethan Hunt and his team retrieving a key that gives access to the Sebastopol, a Russian nuclear submarine destroyed by the AI and lying beneath the polar ice cap, where a box containing the AI's source code is located. The key is recovered in the first part, leaving the second to stage the recovery of the box that will allow – by virtue of a strictly incomprehensible technological operation – to trick the AI and trap it in a key, like a bad genie in a bottle.

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