The Misinformation Age

Greetings friends. This is a bit of an odd entry, owing to a late cut to make a piece that was getting too big into a standalone. More on that at the end, along with a review of the new Mission: Impossible, and an embarrassingly thorough fact-check on a Ranker listicle about Orson Welles' role in Transformers: The Movie.

Stunted Growth

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
(dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 2025)

For nearly three decades, Missions: Impossible have been coming out at an ideal rate. Every three to six years we'd get a new Tom Cruise stunt delivery vehicle, long enough for audiences to tire, and short enough that they don't lose interest either. Because it's been here all along it blessedly didn't need to make a legacy sequel like nearly every other blockbuster. The Final Reckoning has made one anyway, if to put the series to bed rather the ill-advisedly revive it.

The previous installment, Dead Reckoning, Part 1, ended not with a cliffhanger, but with an act break. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), with the help of expert pickpocket Grace (Haley Atwell) and his Impossible Missions Force comrades Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), had obtained the two parts of a cruciform key needed to access the source code of a rogue AI, the Entity, that had infiltrated government networks across the globe. All that was left was to find the Russian submarine Sebastapol carrying the source code and destroy it. Now two months have passed and Ethan has been in hiding while Luther works to create an algorithm to counter the Entity while in the end stage of an unnamed terminal illness. In the meantime the Entity has overtly sabotaged communications across the world and is poised to trigger simultaneous attacks from all the nuclear powers.

This sounds straightforward enough, but it has been made needlessly convoluted. The Entity's emissary in the previous movie, Gabriel (Esai Morales), has now been forsaken and wants to harness it for his own ends. Gabriel worked before as both a cipher for the AI and as a retconned personal nemesis for Hunt, and this development leaves him without a distinctive goal and the AI without a face. Gabriel disappears for over an hour, and in his absence characters attempt to explain the motivations and mechanics of how the Entity operates and how they will counteract it. Past entries were able to have fun with how confusing the plots could get because it really didn't matter so long as it was clear why a movie was launching into its next setpiece. That just takes so long to do here, and the locations the characters get shuffled around to are mostly confined anonymous spaces—a subway tunnel, a dungeon, a government office, an arctic research outpost, an underground vault—that are largely devoid of other people.

It doesn't help that that hour of wheel-spinning also involves pulling in elements from the previous movies to inflate the current one's stakes with nostalgia. There are intrusive footage flashbacks, of course, but also sweaty attempts to tie an old Macguffin to the new one, and old characters that are blown up to absurdly grandiose significance relative to their prior roles. The actors handle it well, with Rhames especially leveraging his actual importance to the series to sell a rather arbitrary development. But the script overall is so self-serious that it isn't until Tramell Tillman makes a star-is-borne appearance as a sardonic submarine captain haflway through that the movie remembers this is supposed to be fun.

That is the point at which the movie finally gets to where it has been going, and the going is good. Diving into a sunken deep sea submarine is obviously too ridiculously big for even Tom Cruise to actually do, but he is doing all the underwater work the sequence needs to sell it, and the way McQuarrie's camera catches and follows the rising and rotating water levels as the sub turns over on its side makes for incredible tension. The movie resets the pacing again to get to the climactic biplane chase, but that ceases to matter once it gets going: there are so many ways it finds for Cruise to hang on for dear life that it tops the much-balleyhooed opening jet takeoff sequence from Rogue Nation multiple times.

These are top-tier action, some of the best in a series that became an institution because of it. It's a mild bummer then that Mission: Impossble's nominally final entry spends so much time reflecting on Legacy rather than delivering that on which its legacy was built.

Meme and Orson Welles

Here is a real-life example of technology manipulating the truth. It involves that happiest of subjects, Orson Welles' performance as the voice of Unicron the transforming planet in 1986's Transformers: The Movie, his final role before his death.

A friend asked me recently what I thought Welles, a man of the theater and famous for producing innovative work on minimal resources, might make of Grand Theft Hamlet. I thought of Unicron, and Welles' palpable disdain for the role, and before answering I looked it up just to be sure I remembered correctly.

In my search I stumbled on Welles' entry on this Ranker listicle "The Most Overqualified Performances in the Transformers Franchise," which contains this eyebrow-raising assertion:

This claim crumbles under the gentlest scrutiny. In the first place, Transformers: The Movie was animated; there was no set for Welles to come onto. Moreover, this claim goes against the infamous quote from his biographer Barbara Leaming's 1995 book:

So what's going on here? Doesn't the Ranker author cite and link to his sources? Doesn't he use quotes?

The first link in the item points to a June 22, 2007 Today Show article, credited to the Tribune syndicate, which includes a quote, attributed to Flint Dille, the movie's story consultant:

“He came in ... and said, ‘I’m playing an entire planet!”’ Dille recalled on a DVD of the film released last year.

This indicates a more positive recording studio experience than Welles is most known for, though I would weigh the testimony of his biographer over the staffer of a "job of work," as he put it. But still, it is a primary source, a witness. It's something.

But what about that lengthy Shockwave quote?

A Googling turns up very little: a couple Reddit posts and the comments section of a wrestling blog post, all from May 8, 2022. A comment in one of the Reddits cites Henry Jaglom's transcripts of his chats with Welles collected in Peter Biskind's My Lunches With Orson, per the Twitter account of journalist Max Borg, responding to another user, Rob Wesley, who had posted a screen capture of what appears to be the first appearance of the exchange.

Borg is perhaps giving it the benefit of the doubt, knowing about Jaglom's book and so thinking the quote could have come from there. It is exceedingly unlikely: Rob Wesley is a shitpost account, and My Lunches With Orson is on Google Books and searchable, and nothing comes up with a search for "shockwave." This isn't as definitive an answer as actually having the book, but I'm not so hyperfocused on this that I'm going to make a $10 ebook purchase to make a point.

Unfortunately for the Ranker author, the Google Books page is the link he uses to cite the quote.

None of this on its own is terribly consequential. Transformers: The Movie is an unfortunate punctuation mark in Orson Welles' career. The only people who seem to think the quote is real are users on the Transformers subreddit, and half of them are playing along with the bit. And it's a good bit! It has the cadence that makes 'Orson Welles voice' a great internet meme, and it's especially funny because Rob Wesley knew enough of Welles to include Jaglom.

But it's worrisome that Ranker paid someone to make a fun fact of a joke meme that is funny because it is the exact opposite of the fact-fact. It demonstrates how the internet of the past decade-and-a-half already incentivized low-quality high-volume Search Engine Optimized clickbait over accuracy. Widespread adoption of generative AI by content farms will create exponentially greater amounts of cheap slop. This happened just last week.

Orson Welles was no stranger to the porous bounds between fact and fiction. He made an entire movie about the subject, F for Fake, and in doing so invented the mockumentary. One of his most famous productions was a radio adaptation of War of the Worlds that convinced some listeners that Earth really was being invaded by aliens. His was a dry wit, and when it comes to the joke quote, I suspect he would have been tickled. He would be aghast, though, that anyone would seriously think he preferred Shockwave over Megatron.

So what would Orson Welles have made of Grand Theft Hamlet?

Maurice LaMarche, who re-enacted Welles' "Frozen Peas" in its entirety as The Brain on Animaniacs, is $100 on Cameo. I am hyperfocused enough to pay this, though LaMarche is sadly not currently available for requests.

Brief Interlude on Hideo's Mise en Scene

A few weeks ago Hideo Kojima took another furtive step toward consummating his love affair with the movies and announced that the A24-produced adaptation of his game Death Stranding now has a director attached: Michael Sarnoski, director of horrror thriller A Quiet Place: Day One and Nicolas Cage pig thriller Pig. The news got me in the mood to revisit Metal Gear Solid, Kojima's first and arguably still best marriage of gameplay and cinematic storytelling. One thing led to another and I ended up (re)playing the whole series, and now in the lead up to the June 26 release of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, I'm going full completionist and am going to do a retrospective on the agony and ecstasy of Kojima's filmic aspirations within the game space.

The plan is to cover Kojima's career in stages rather than each game individually, but we'll see if I stick to that. I was going to include them with other pieces like in this edition rather than as big standalones, but I'm already backing off from that for length reasons. The first installment, on Kojima's background up through his debut with the original Metal Gear, was going to be included here (where it would have fit well considering how much the new Mission: Impossible reminds me of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots) but instead should be out this week.

I hope you enjoy this! Kojima is going to get a lot more mainstream attention as the Death Stranding movie approaches, so I hope I can convey why for better and worse he's such a big deal. He's one of the few "auteurs" able to thrive within big-budget games but also a film obsessive whose Twitter bio states "my body is 70% made of movies," and a visionary designer whose work sometims threatens to be undone by his unedited scripts. Which is to say he's a paradox ripe for coverage here.

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