So don’t count on a judicious balancing of what is right here and wrong there. Just settle for the bleak, ecstatic estimate Digger has of itself: that it deserves to be seen and judged as a fitting celebration of the nihilist frivolity of our last days.

Digger isn’t just a final story; it’s the explosive closure on history. If it is a masterpiece, then it abandons and scatters the ideal that such lofty models exist to nourish us. Instead it indicates that movies and empires are nothing more than leaves of used toilet paper — the consequence of cancer of the asshole. (That remark isn’t just gratuitous rhetoric; it’s a plot point in the picture, and I won’t spoil it any further.)

It’s proper to say that as the film begins a plain and vulgar doofus of infinite wealth and power wakes up in an antique and palatial bedroom to discover that his wretched and inert white cat has used the bed it and the man share as a latrine. As well as that embarrassment, the ending of the world has begun.

The man is Digger, the most profound oil tycoon in forever. He is “Digger” because in the past his family pioneers dug for oil as the world’s elemental energizer and elixir (it was a currency like “happiness” or “the American idea”). He keeps the original shovel mounted on the wall, as a piece of the true cross. But now his sophisticated information systems report that due to his exploiting the resources of Greenland, immense portions of the icecap have been set loose in the ocean and… well, to serve it neat, on the rocks, the world is lucidly doomed.

I say “lucidly” because everyone, and every climate denier, knows, and has always known, how this finale was going to work: surpassing what any disaster movie has ever shown. The deadly deal is sketched in very fast, with ocean streams going into reverse, the permafrost and the methane, the billions of casualties to a point of extinction. And climate deniers long ago consented to this scenario: they have been purchasing and fortifying the high ground, with private energy, pantries of caviar and cheesecake, all the Matisses they can obtain, armories of guns, and the self-satisfaction that will allow them to have as good an end of time as possible. Because “survival” is just a pretentious PR word for getting yours while you can. And fuck the rest of them (formerly known as us).

Digger knows this situation is ripe for farce — or the kind of half-baked crisis the old Ethan Hunt had a knack of solving. But hasn’t every attempt at sensible warning, scientific explanation and knick-of-time rescue been exhausted and put in aspic? Why kid ourselves that we’ve ever been serious about being serious? Just relish how this merry doomsday doesn’t even mention AI — the filmmakers likely reckoned they were being hip enough and on the money by referring to Greenland.

So the film’s end game is played out by Digger and a haggard POTUS scrambling not to save Earth but simply to handle the story. This is a breakthrough event (our cultural icepack is cracking): not just a disaster movie but the demonstration that we can only treat our catastrophe as a show and as entertainment.

Digger will be regarded as the vision and the enterprise of Mexican director Alejandro Iñárritu, working from a story idea that he came up with alongside Sabina Berman and Jez Butterworth. There are impressive credentials in these names. Iñárritu made Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006), Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015), among others. He has been working away at “survival” for a long time. Berman is a journalist, playwright and novelist. Butterworth is a versatile screenwriter, whose works range from The Birthday Girl (2001) to forays with James Bond and Indiana Jones, and the play Jerusalem.

Judged simply from a writer’s point of view, Digger, the finished film of 129 minutes and $125 million, is a striking yet shallow fable, and rather hit and miss. Not all the jokes land well, and we have an array of  supporting characters (including John Goodman as POTUS, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, and Michael Stuhlbarg) who are introduced but not adequately explored — as if the film doesn’t have the time or the energy to really get into them. As if it doesn’t have that much faith in people.

That is an observation more than a complaint, but it cannot hide the fact that this is a Tom Cruise vehicle. The cries of distress, betrayal and confusion over the movie (and I suspect they will be noisy) will spring from the way Cruise is presented. This is an aspect of the actor as vivid and detailed as an eccentric from Dickens but shocking if you have loved the old Tom Cruise. This is as bold, crazy and unthinkable as casting Jimmy Stewart to be Norman Bates. But for much good and some incidental ill, Tom is the auteur of this movie.

So don’t go away thinking he has been tricked or traduced in this wipe-out mission. It’s more significant that Cruise is on camera nearly the whole time, and that his production company had been central in setting up the film. Indeed, it’s absurd to think that this wayward and eccentric venture would ever have had its green light without Tom.

One explanation is that Tom, at 64, is eager for a shot at an Oscar and some decent respect for his acting. He will have heard the lamentation over many years at how the actor who was flat-out brilliant and merciless with his sexual fascist in Magnolia (1999) — playing a prophet of male dominance and then going into emotional breakdown — has evaded his own potential with that eternal fantasy twerp Ethan Hunt who has never seen a cliff he wouldn’t jump off or a face-cracking grin he couldn’t hold together.

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Cruise has sometimes had it in him to be an actor instead of a brazen personality. Apart from Magnolia, he has been very good in Rain Man (1988), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Jerry Maguire (1996) and Collateral (2004), but he always sinks back into the monotony of routine pictures celebrating prowess. Most of these have been very successful and helped build his daft persona as a mini-man, a dynamo, edging closer to a kind of frenzied mastery. Yet he also comes across as someone who lacks the willingness to grow older, let alone more mature. This can hardly come easily (unless he is truly something other than humdrum human). Amid the real life allowed by Scientology, he has had a storyline of failed relationships and the glee of jumping on Oprah’s sofa. As much as Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny, Tom is endearing because he seems so radiantly alien.

His Digger does not look like Tom Cruise. He is paunchy, balding, meandering and maniacally casual. He is also hysterically emphatic and self-repetitive. As in much of his work, Cruise feels plugged into a secret power source. (You can see what Scientology digs in him.) It’s as if the idiotic has become axiomatic. There is no suggestion of Tom imitating or being influenced by Donald Trump, but Digger gets that big man’s imbecilic authority and his hunch that power proves itself by doing whatever it wants. The result is so startling Cruise may dance away from the wreckage with an Oscar, just because so many actors will feel inspired by his tribute to unrestrained and shameless impulse.

Yet his frantic command restricts the potential of this film. If Cruise felt more nuanced, or was more open to doubt, there might be a sunset glow of tragedy around his stupid power-broker. Digger’s few close ties might come to life as black holes of failure. But Tom is so terrified of being boring he cannot stoop to stillness or quiet. On screen all the time, he becomes an oppressor to the film’s comedy. In so many earlier satires on America (like the films by Frank Capra in the Thirties, like Citizen Kane or the Godfather films), disaster was averted and masked by some sprightly adventure or an ironic trust in good will and staying as cheery as Ethan Hunt or as calm as Michael Corleone. That relief does not exist in Digger. And so the film reaches a giddy summit, where it admits the futility of our hope for the future, and then exults in it. This leads to an airy and fascinating conceit, involving the most appealing figure in the film (played by Jesse Plemons). But that waits for you to find it.

Does this seem more or less than a “masterpiece”? To grasp that, we need to study the best things in Digger. There are at least three people who deserve great credit. They were all hired by Iñárritu, and they are collaborators in his surrealist vision. From the outset, we see Digger’s mansion filled with decrepit antiques in a dead light. A look of gray ice pervades the movie; primary colors have been eliminated; the attempts at “design” are fatuous. There is no human touch any longer. And in some crowd scenes, the seething mass of humanoids includes mannequins and models. Some of us are dead or unalive already. This comes from the production design of Dennis Gassner (assisted by Richard Johnson), from the drab-gaudy costumes of Jacqueline West, and the drained photography of Emmanuel Lubezki. These are more than conventional craft contributions.

The uniqueness of Digger — though it has some inheritance from The Truman Show (1998), a film Gassner designed, and from Poor Things (2023) — is beyond reality and seeming “beautiful”. It knows the pompous shabbiness that is being introduced these days in Washington and Florida, the tasteless splendor of the death wish. The bogus arch, the dead pool, the Cinderella ballroom, and the sighs of religiosity as he talks to his mad mirror. It’s more alarming than any amount of body-snatching or flesh-eating. This is the first film I can think of that could be the last great film we may see.

As early as the first Die Hard movie (1988), Willis had perfected a way of delivering his lines with a little smirk of self-awareness that suggested he was just slightly cooler than the movie, an admission which somehow made the movies cooler. For his part, Cage had embraced a style of florid overacting, which was palatable and often fun precisely because of its obviousness and self-awareness, and when he found himself in the outlandish contraption of a Nineties action movie like The Rock or Face/Off, he really let loose, taking corny melodrama to the level of camp, taking cartoon villainy to the level of professional wrestling. The boldness of these meta-comic performances by these two actors, and the great success of those movies, created a sort of action movie culture — a larger tendency in the making of those formulaic spectacles that turned their native cynicism absurdity into an ironic style of its own.

The first Mission: Impossible appeared in the middle of all this, more or less. It was a nice blend of the dank European spy thriller and bright American action movie, but its director Brian DePalma endowed it with that slightly lurid DePalma tone, and its famous set-piece of a helicopter chained to a train inside the Chunnel was pretty over-the-top, basically meta-comic like those Cage and Willis movies. Still, by the standards of the decade, Mission: Impossible 1 was pretty understated. Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), on the other hand, was a full expression of the decade’s action-movie madness. John Woo, who’d directed Face/Off, — a movie to which the phrase “over the top” is uniquely inadequate — created heavily stylized action scenes that were both visually striking and a little ridiculous, and he staged the romantic interplay between Tom Cruise and Thandiwe Newton in the tones of extra-ripe melodrama familiar from his vaguely religious Hong Kong films. And, well, sometimes you couldn’t help laughing a little.

It’s easy to imagine Tom Cruise — who by this second Mission: Impossible had become a producer as well as the star of the franchise — looking back on the movie and telling his team, “Okay. Let’s not have any more of that extra-ripe melodrama stuff. Let’s not have any more half-intentional metacomedy. I am not Bruce Willis. I am not Nicholas Cage. I’m Tom Cruise. I don’t want people laughing at my movies and wondering if I’m in on the joke.” That is, the move from sodden and spiritual John Woo directing Mission: Impossible 2 to utilitarian J.J. Abrams directing Mission: Impossible 3 (2006) seems a pretty obvious and intentional course-correction. From then on, the campy excess, and the signs of directorial license and vision, disappeared. There was more excess than ever, of course, but it wasn’t campy. And there was plenty of license, but the person enjoying the license, the person whose vision informed these movies, was not some artsy-fartsy director, who might make the star come off campy or accidentally funny, but the star himself, the star of stars, Tom Cruise.

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From that point — though they grew ever more complex in both their set-pieces and their plots — the movies were no longer a little weird in their framing and tone, their look, their vision. The ambient postmodernism of the Nineties was gone. Amazingly, though, they stayed pretty good. They were thrilling and fun. They set a standard for consistency and reliability in a movie franchise that will be hard to beat. What I can say, movie-review-wise, about Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning is that it’s almost exactly as good, almost exactly as fun and exciting, as the last five or six Mission: Impossibles. It’s being reported that The Final Reckoning is the final Mission: Impossible. If that’s so, then the series is ending neither on a high note nor as a disappointment, but as the sound realization of well-founded expectations.

As successful and well-made as these movies have been, they’ve also been… I’m tempted to say they’ve been a little soulless, but that’s not quite right. It’s not that these movies don’t have a soul. They do have a soul, but it’s the soul of a Scientologist. Most of what I know about Scientology I know from things Tom Cruise was filmed saying about it, and what Scientology seems to have done for (or to) Tom Cruise is to make him believe that he can do pretty much anything. More specifically, the power or value-added of Scientology seems to be that this ability to do pretty much anything flows from the Scientologist’s, or at least Tom Cruise’s, belief in this ability. It’s the belief that counts, the believer’s will, the believing willer’s power to commit, the committed believer’s power to do… something, whatever. When Tom Cruise speaks about how Scientology empowers him, he sounds absolutely ready and able to take action, heroic action if necessary, but he’s somewhat befuddled, if not mentally paralyzed, on the matter of why he might act, what purpose his superhuman powers of action might serve. But it’s also clear that, should a worthwhile purpose fall into his lap, he totally believes he’d be able to do almost anything to realize it.

This latter stretch of Mission: Impossible movies is a testament to this belief, and to the unusual powers that possibly flow from it. And luckily for Cruise, the films themselves provide him with a self-renewing purpose to which he can direct his special powers. That purpose is to exceed, in scale of spectacle and physical daring of stunts and complicatedness of plot, in each new Mission: Impossible, whatever was done in the last Mission: Impossible. It’s necessary to interject here that Cruise not only stars in and produces these movies. He does his own stunts in these them, and it is central to the meaning of these movies that everyone knows this. These stunts rise to their highest greatness and their greatest importance in The Final Reckoning.

I’m not being totally fair to the later Mission: Impossibles when I say they have the soul of a Scientologist. They are dominated by this soul, but the light of other souls flickers pleasingly within them. They are wonderfully cast, with great villains extending back to Philip Seymour Hoffman in Mission: Impossible 3 and forward to the latest villain, played by Esai Morales. And when Vanessa Kirby arrived as the semi-villainous White Widow in Mission: Impossible: Fallout (2018), it felt like the movie and I were both being defibrillated. I’ve approached every subsequent MI with one initial thought: I hope the White Widow is in it.

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One funny thing about the White Widow is how, despite her sexual charge and ambiguous motives, she exemplifies a sort of children’s-movie logic in much of the franchise’s characterization. Many characters in the Mission: Impossible movies — to use the moral language of my daughters when they were little — start out mean but end up nice. Aside from the one main villain in each movie, Ethan Hunt’s antagonists always end up on his side, won over to a principle of universal niceness — which is anchored by the presence of a global threat — that his impossibly elaborate Mission is meant to serve. This is morally simple, if not simple-minded, but it works okay within the sentimental world of the franchise, which is otherwise dominated by movie machinery overcoming itself entirely for the sake of this overcoming, which is to say by the able and empty will of Tom Cruise.

This recourse to universal niceness as a global value made urgent by a global threat goes back at least to Nineties movies such as Armageddon (asteroid) and Independence Day (aliens). In the last two Mission: Impossibles, the global threat is a malevolent AI agent known as the Entity, which (who?) is rapidly taking over the world. The Entity is an even more unnerving action-movie conceit in The Final Reckoning than it was two years ago in Dead Reckoning, because it doesn’t feel so much like an action-movie conceit anymore. Maybe that’s why I wanted it to be a bigger presence in the new film. We see what it’s doing — casting a veil of confusion over people’s perceptions of the world, taking over the arsenals of every nuclear power — but we don’t get to hear the electronic thrum of its voice nearly enough. We don’t get to have the super-intelligent AI blow our minds by explaining itself.

Of course, this is because it’s a Mission: Impossible movie, a Tom Cruise production, in which the wildest, spookiest, most interesting thing to emerge in the history of the world has to take a back seat to, well, stunts. As the Mission: Impossible franchise has gone on, the daredevil stunts, and the public knowledge that Cruise is doing them, have grown in importance. The last two movies — despite the likable and beautiful cast of side-characters, and despite the logistical complexity of their individual capers and their larger plot — emit a somewhat reductive sense that they’re built for the sake of their stunts, that the film is a vehicle for Tom Cruise to show the world the insane things he has the iron will and thus the barely human ability to do.

But there’s a niggling aesthetic problem with Cruise’s superhuman self-belief. When you’re watching the Mission: Impossible stunt sequences, you inevitably start thinking about the stunt, not as a thrilling physical trial of a character in a movie story you’ve suspended your disbelief to enter as if it’s real life, but as a stunt. Instead of just worrying that the villain might get the better of our hero Ethan Hunt as the two of them wrestle with physics and luck and each other, you can’t help drifting into spell-breaking reflections, especially as the sequence extends into its ninth or tenth minute. “Wow,” you start thinking, “it’s really Tom Cruise doing that stunt. I wonder if he was scared. How does he hang on so long? How old is he now? Sixty-something? Jeez, that’s impressive for his age. For any age, really. I wonder what his wife thinks about all this. Who’s his wife now? Wait. He’s not married anymore, is he? I think I read something about that pretty Spanish actress.”

The Mission: Impossibles, then, go overboard in a way that would have forced various ironic concessions from other action-movie franchises, or in other action-movie eras. Were James Bond to motorcycle from a cliff and then parachute to the ground, he’d have to accent his landing with a cheeky adjustment of his bowtie or something, to cue the audience to chuckle at this self-aware gesture and not at the silliness and improbability of the thing itself. But the Mission: Impossibles see no need for cheeky gesturing because there’s no artifice to acknowledge. As it was the real Tom Cruise treating that rocky cliff as a motorcycle ramp, it is Tom Cruise himself pendulating gracefully under that parachute, easing down to the riverbank for that elegant landing. You might rather applaud than laugh, like someone in the stands at the Olympics.

The impressive self-creation and self-mythologizing of Tom Cruise have woven his roles as actor, producer, stuntman, and celebrity into a single entity, so to speak, one consuming presence so looming and powerful it turns the usual actor-movie relationship inside out. When you drift into those distracted reflections as he does his unlikely stunts, it starts to feel less like Tom Cruise is an actor in the latest Mission: Impossible than that the latest Mission: Impossible is a prop in the epic saga of Tom Cruise, an elaborate demonstration that he can do anything, that he’s big enough to contain anything. Tom Cruise isn’t in Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning. Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning is in Tom Cruise. But this means that the films and their star were always in a strange competition with each other. The movies needed to exceed their predecessors in action-movie magnitude, and Cruise needed to loom larger than the movies, to envelop their expanding artifice in his Tom Cruise reality. As the movies got bigger, Cruise and his stunts had to grow in scale and daring too.

There’s a signal in the latest entry, though, that this existential arms-race between movie star and movie franchise had to end — Cruise’s hair. The first thing you notice when Ethan Hunt appears on screen is that he seems to have missed a couple of haircuts. His hair is weirdly long. It’s over his ears. Another character even makes a joke about it. “I like the longer hair,” Hayley Atwell’s Grace says when she and we first see him. That is, the movie resorts to a cheeky gesture of self-awareness, a bit of action-movie irony, to adjust for Cruise’s conspicuous do. But why is it an issue? Why does he have distracting hair when it has no importance to the story, and when it doesn’t look very good? The first thing I thought of, which my wife echoed, is that he has longer hair to make himself look younger than he is.

The long hair is an aging man’s ruse, a bit of artifice that can’t be denied. So it has to be acknowledged, via an ironic mention at the beginning of the aging man’s new movie. This is a queasy moment. It reminds us that there’s at least one aspect of reality that the muscular will of Tom Cruise hasn’t mastered after all. It hasn’t mastered time.

And so the Mission: Impossible franchise is ending not because it’s said all it needs to say. It’s been saying the same thing for 20 years, which never really needed to be said in the first place. There’s no reason it couldn’t keep repeating itself. The franchise is ending because its star can’t sustain his mastery over it. Tom Cruise can’t keep being bigger than his massive movies — despite the Scientology pep talks he gives himself — because time and age are making him smaller. He surely can’t keep doing those elaborate stunts. The most he can do, perhaps, is to grow his hair so it’s over his ears, and then join everyone else in laughing at it.

Religion, that is.

There’s been huge excitement about Bieber’s involvement with the Australian-founded charismatic Hillsong Church – the church even had to issue a denial to clarify that they hadn’t pressured him to cancel recent tour dates. The Sun reports:

“Justin Bieber takes his girlfriends there to get the Pastor’s approval – including Paola Paulin. His ex-girlfriend’s Selena Gomez and Hailey Baldin have also attended services, while stars such High School Musical’s Vanessa Hudgens, Hailee Steinfeld, Nick Jonas.”

At the same time that the Canadian pop star has been recommitting himself to the faith of his upbringing there’s been a significant lawyering up from the Scientologists after Leah Remini (of the US comedy series, King of Queens) didn’t just exit the church after 30 years of membership but put together audience-rousing documentaries explaining why she had departed. The Church has even set up a series of websites to undermine the credentials of other former Scientologists featured in Remini’s “Scientology and the Aftermath”.

It’s no secret that a celebrity endorsement helps promote a brand and religious groups can be as excitable about the stardust as anyone else. And quite understandably. Taking just one possible measure of their ability to spread religious (or other) messages, look at Twitter. Justin Bieber has 102 million followers. That’s 62 million more than Donald Trump and 88 million more than the Pope! Quite useful if you believe that your mission is to “go everywhere in the world and tell the Good News to everyone”.

Almost no-one is in the same social media league as the 23 year-old singer and songwriter but as someone who worked in corporate communications for Christian charities for nine years, I well remember the reaction every time someone off the telly outed themselves as a Christian. In one corner a colleague would call for urgency “before the charity down the road snaps them up”. Wiser sages would urge caution – in case, for example, anything came to light about the public figure’s background that might complicate the reputation of any charity willing to be associated with them. And – at an extreme – a cause (fairly or unfairly) risks the “Remini treatment” if celebrities feel used in any way. Even if the charity-celebrity relationship is healthy, the spotlight generated by an association is not a comfortable place for some religious leaders. Guardian columnist Marina Hyde, for example, asks difficult questions about Justin Bieber’s pastor at Hillsong and his approach to confidentiality, to gay people and to celebration of ‘hot wives’.

Famous believers

Religion and fame is often a strange combination in the West, and we don’t always know what to do with a disclosure of belief, especially when a celebrity converts. A fundamental lack of religious literacy means many journalists write about religious groups as though they’re some sort of sideshow. Facing such reporting, Madonna used a Harper’s Bazaar interview to counter some of the claims made about her practice of Kabbalah – claiming that her efforts to become a better person “made people nervous”.

Some of the most thoughtful analysis about a high profile person’s belief often comes from commentators who aren’t afraid to write themselves and their own religious background into the story, and who spend some time getting to know people involved in the faith community. Check out the poignant account of Hillsong by Jewish NYC mum Taffy Brodessa-Akner and atheist Michael Marsden’s experience of the Alpha course, following Sam Fox and Geri Halliwell’s participation in what is an introduction to the Christian faith that occurs during ten weekly sessions.

Raising the issues

Because celebrities have access to platforms that the rest of us don’t have, they can be formidable educators about religion. British comic and actor Stephen Fry, for example, provoked public debate about blasphemy laws when he criticised the notion of a loving God. Sadly, despite this being the 21st century with greater levels of education than ever before, we need to be reassured by Sir Mo Farah and others that not all Muslims are out to kill us. And Sir Mo spoke out against the US President’s executive order on immigration earlier this year.

Meanwhile, the Jewish Mayim Bialik (of Blossom and Big Bang Theory) describes herself as “socially conservative” and uses her YouTube channel to discuss modesty and women’s empowerment: