The Secret Meaning of Tom Cruise's Knife in Final 'Mission: Impossible' Trailer
The last mission is almost here. In the latest trailer for Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is not only facing his biggest enemy ever, he's also reckoning with his past. At several points in the new trailer, we see flashes from the first Mission: Impossible movie in 1996, including several shots of a knife that Ethan dropped way back during a very pivotal moment.
Here's why that knife is such a big deal in the trailer and what it might mean for the end of Ethan Hunt's journey in The Final Reckoning.
Picking up where the last movie left off, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning will deal with Ethan and the remaining members of the IMF gang dealing with the threat of a rogue AI called "The Entity." But this time, the trailer makes it very clear that Ethan's entire career as a super spy will be relevant to this final mission, and it's all connected to a knife he dropped back in 1996.
At several points in the trailer, we see scenes from the first movie, in which Ethan had to hack information from a vault, and dropped his knife. The trailer shows the knife getting discovered, and we even see Ethan contemplating the knife in the present day. What's going on here?
The trailer doesn't make it clear yet, but it seems that somehow, the Entity or some other enemy in the new movie will have intimate knowledge of Ethan and the IMF, all because of this dropped knife. Though the first movie came out nearly thirty years ago, the specifics of that mission have come back to haunt Ethan all these years later. Did Ethan somehow create this AI by dropping the knife? Was some other series of events set into motion?
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Because Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning is set to be the last installment of this version of the series, it stands to reason that there will be plenty of twists and turns before everything is revealed. But, clearly, based on this trailer, the biggest piece of the puzzle is a knife that Tom Cruise dropped exactly 29 years ago.