Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning's two-part story claimed at least major character as a victim in Part One - but can we really believe our eyes when it comes to this franchise?
(MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW)
Former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) has been a breakout fan-favorite of the Mission: Impossible movies since making her debut in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, but in Dead Reckoning Part One she seemed to meet a brutal end.
Mission: Impossible 7 revealed Ethan Hunt's (Tom Cruise) rival Gabriel - an assassin from Ethan's dark days in espionage, prior to joining the IMF. Gabriel once emotionally scarred Ethan by killing a woman close to him; the AI system "The Entity" recruits Gabriel to stop Ethan and IMF from dismantling it, and uses the assassin to force Ethan into an emotionally compromised position, by choosing which female companion dies by Gabriel's hand: expert thief Grace (Hayley Atwell) or Ilsa. Well, Ilsa steps up to the challenge and battles Gabriel in a duel of blades but ultimately loses that battle and her life.
Is Ilsa Faust REALLY Dead or Still Alive?
Mission: Impossible 7 makes Ilsa's death into a pretty dramatic affair, and even goes so far as showing her dead with eyes open before Ethan arrives (too late) and properly lays her to rest. It's about as final a death scene as we've gotten in Mission: Impossible - or is it?
Dead Reckoning has quite a few callbacks to Brian De Palma's original Mission: Impossible movie - a film that was entirely built on the fake-out death of Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), to throw off suspicion that he was head of a criminal scheme. It would be a full-circle turn to have Ethan learn from that experience and pull a fake-out death with Ilsa.
There is room in the story for it: Gabriel's execution of Ilsa was a play by the Entity to get Ethan to focus on killing Gabriel and not obtaining the key to controlling/destroying it. By having Ilsa live, it would arguably give Ethan an edge by having a silent partner that the Entity isn't compensating for in its predictions. Both Ethan and Ilsa are masters of sleight of hand, so while everyone is keeping their eye on what Ethan and his IMF team are doing, Mission: Impossible 8 could pull an Ocean's Eleven surprise by revealing that Ilsa and her own squad were hard at work, as well. It could arguably be a way of bringing back any number of surprise characters with Ilsa, such as Jeremy Renner's William Brandt, Paula Patton's Jane Carter, etc.
On the other hand: Ilsa's death did actually serve some kind of function in the story, as her emotional connection with Ethan was what created the emotional stakes for whether or not Ethan could achieve his objective (get the key) in Dead Reckoning Part One. It also creates stakes for Dead Reckoning Part Two, as Ethan's rivalry with Gabriel isn't just rooted in a flashback to a woman we don't know - it's now connected to the death of a major fan-favorite, who needs avenging.
Mission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie has seemed to echo that sentiment, in his defense of Ilsa's death - basically hinting that it will indeed be permanent, to give the story both the edge and thematic purpose it served:
"Mission is primarily Ethan's journey (and) there is this continuum that the people closest to him, he tends to lose them," McQuarrie told USA Today. "It was a really tricky conversation for us to have, and we knew that there would be some reactions to that, but we also knew this is the reality of the world that's been created over seven movies."
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One is now in theaters and IMAX.
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