Posted by Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Terminator: Dark Fate and Mission Impossible 7: Dead Reckoning.
It never ceases to amaze me that whilst everyone struggles everyday with software systems that don’t work well and now everything grinds to a halt when a server goes down or something has been hacked, the question of Will AI take over the world? is still regularly asked. And, I can’t help but think that this is the fault of Hollywood.
Two of last year’s big box office franchise films: Terminator: Dark Fate (Dark Fate) and Mission Impossible 7: Dead Reckoning (MI:7) had similar tropes of AI is humanity’s greatest threat and yet I felt very differently about them.
In both films, the fate of the world depends on our favourite humans destroying the AI. In Dark Fate, the AI robot terminator which has travelled back in time cannot kill Dani Ramos. In MI:7 Ethan Hunt has to destroy the AI entity which is altering all digital information, the very truth as we know it, an enemy that is everywhere and nowhere and has no centre… and save humanity from itself as all the corrupt governments think they can own the AI, only Ethan knows best. So far, so fabulous!
Now, I know that there is no such thing as time travelling liquid-metal robots who can regenerate at a moments notice and keep chasing our heroines even when divided into skin and metal skeleton, but I was there hanging on the edge of my seat. Whereas with Tom Cruise’s entity, a self-aware, self-learning, truth-eating digital parasite infesting all of cyberspace…I just couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief as Coleridge would have put it. It was just completely unbelievable from the first sweaty, high stakes, high security scene full of the statements I have put above in italics.
And, Why was this, Ruth? Well, you may ask. It took me a while but I have finally figured it out.
Jungian archetypes
The Terminator liquid melting man in Dark Fate taps into our primal fear of being chased and according to Jungian psychologist Dr Pinkola Estes it is a Jungian archetypal nightmare which is on a list of classic universal dreams/nightmares. We’ve all had that dream and that fear.
MI:7‘s Entity should theoretically be doing the same. Again it is a primal existential fear, of things that go bump in the night and try to possess us, that has neatly transferred onto the ghost in the machine, but it was lacking in execution.
Firstly, it has a key that could unlock the AI made up of two key halves which form a cruciform, like in the film Uncharted, that can only be detected with augmented reality glasses, and at the same time, it appears as an seeing eye like Lord of the Rings’s Sauron in screens, which one reviewer said looked like a bad windows screensaver. Then it leaves physical puzzles for people to solve because it knows them. Then it has an avenging angel called Gabriel, who is Ethan’s old arch nemesis whom we’ve never heard of all before even though we’ve been on seven journeys now with Ethan Hunt.
And probably because it’s the seventh journey, they all borrow the Lawrence of Arabia script getting a bit fatalistic saying it is written and no one can outrun their fate, unless you are Tom who can run very fast even if the Entity is impersonating his friend and can predict all the outcomes, especially of human behaviour. It is a right old mish-mash especially when it gets onto predicting when people will die and we are not even shown a scene when it hacks peoples’ fitbits and those Zoe glucose monitors. I thought it was busy destroying reality, not as we know it, Jim, not predicting life expectancy.
If the Entity had been a secret organisation say, trying to take over the world, and rub everyone out who got in their way, it would have been much more compelling, much more sinister. This AI plus mishmash didn’t add up to more than it’s parts and they missed a trick. For when you add in an archetype it lends a resonance in that Gestaltian way which adds up to so much more than the sum of its parts. They didn’t even try to make the AI work within the constraints of technology. It works like magic instead.
The Cloud under the Sea
The Cloud which we all imagine pixelates beautifully like when we shoot someone in Fortnite and sucks up our data into the sky is actually more prosaically under the sea pushing packets of data along big thick cables with maps showing us how it moves to get to the massive data centres. And yet, in all the submarine movies ever made, we know that when a submarine does a deep dive, it cannot communicate, it is cut off. So, how does the AI get out of the submarine and into the cables?
Well! It is possible if a submarine passes over the cables, or is anchored near a hub. But, we were told at the start of the film that it had approached many vessels and hadn’t been seen as it was testing out its stealth mode. So on the move like that, even if it did criss-cross over cables using VLF (very low frequency) messaging, if it was lucky, the data would transmit at 300bps, bits per second. Bits, not bytes!
The bit is the lowest building block, our 0 or 1. Eight bits make a byte and we can store one of the characters from 0-255; in one byte. So 300 bits per second is not a lot of data. If we compare this to the promise most broadband companies in the UK make of speeds 300 megabytes (one megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes) per second which is a massive difference. Downloading a 5BG film at 300mbs to watch such as MI:7 would take 2.2 minutes. Back on the submarine, the same film would take 37, 037 hours to download. Check it out on the download calculator.
So, how has the Entity managed to get through cyberspace and why does this bother me so much? I mean, I watched Tom in Minority Report, which led a good friend of mine to say, at the time, that he wished he had job like one of the pre-cogs, lying in a bowl of jelly all day predicting the future. And, I loved I, Robot, even though it was daft that another all-seeing AI which a prof had created and which kept him prisoner, still managed not to notice when the prof built a very strong robot without the AI noticing, so that the robot could escape by smashing the glass. Why didn’t the prof escape too? Why did he have to do away with himself and put the clues in the robots’ brain?
I think because MI:7 fails technically and archetypically, instead it blithers on and bangs us over the head with the plot and then wears us out with the details which don’t add up because they can’t.
I have blogged about archetypes and storytelling and emotional resonance. We have to feel it and it has to feel true, whether we are playing a computer game, watching a movie, or immersed in any sort of simulation.
And, I’ve said before how AI works, either with logic and rules applied in knowledge-based systems or a statistical approach using machine learning in an LLM like ChatGPT and layers of artificial neural networks trained on masses of data. At some point either approach logic or stats becomes too brittle, but currently we all love machine learning and keep thinking that if we keep training and adding more layers, regardless of overfitting or underfitting data, they will get more accurate. They have so far, but all good things must come to an end. And, as always happens in these scenarios, people who should know better get carried away and start predicting that AI will evolve into Artificial General Intelligence and its first job will be to build robots that will then learn human emotions and take over the world.
Why would it even bother? Who wants that responsibility?
Getting real: AI, Robots and AI Robots
Robotics comes from the domain of computer science, and we find them everywhere in industry. It is estimated that there are three billion robots working in factories world wide. However, they do limited repetitive tasks over and over, following routines and are not known as AI. In contrast, AI is anything that passes the Turing Test, that is to say any algorithm or bit of software which can replicate human behaviour. This is an all encompassing, very forgiving (some say silly) definition and can include Amazon recommendations and predictive text. In contrast the robot who is doing a limited repetitive task is definitely not passing as a human, it could be lifting heavy cars or something. That is the difference and AI was helped immensely by software engineering and traditional computing.
The domain of artificially intelligent robots or AI robots as represented by the black strip in the Venn diagram below (which I had ChatGPT redraw and make it look robotic and sciencey) is rare and very small indeed because it has been proven in the past to be very, very expensive and too difficult, and if AI were to produce self-replicating robots it would, so they say, draw on Artificial Life which was defined as: A truly general theoretical biology capable of making universal statements about life wherever it may be found and whatever it may be made of, by Christopher Langton back in the 1980s. Though to be honest, it never got very far.
This is because Marovec’s paradox states that high-level reasoning like chess or mathematics or Go requires very little computation in comparison to low-level sensorimotor skills which need masses of it. So, all of the things which male scientists judge to be a measure of intelligence: playing chess well, understanding DNA structures, doing geometry, using logic, and so on, can be easily replicated in a machine. Walking about, interpreting human emotion, learning words and how to use them in the correct context, (and not just by statistics and probability as an LLM does) is just too difficult to model. And, that is before we get onto modelling growing, replicating biologicals cells.
Thankfully, our fictional terminators don’t have to worry about such things and can not only do intelligent things whilst running around, they can defy the laws of time and space. Nice! So when we meet our original Terminator Arnie/Carol in Dark Fate, 27-years later, it has developed empathy and a conscience. Interestingly enough, he has a beard and has also aged.
Not so much in the real world, roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro who built a replica of himself which is now 20+ years old is now injecting himself with Botox and dying his hair, so that he can stop ageing and dwell in the uncanny valley with his replica. Not sure, if Tom/Ethan has a replica, but he is not ageing either and still does age-defying stunts.
Twenty-seven years later
The great thing about creating a time-travelling alternative universe franchise is that it was relatively easy to go rewind back to the end of Terminator 2, which in everyone’s opinion is the seminal one, to go off in a different direction and edit out the films in which Sarah Connor died. Time magazine has a great article untangling all the plot lines and different AI overlords sending terminators back to kill future threats.
In MI:7 Ethan Hunt, is currently living in his own uncanny valley, suspended in the last century. He not only keeping himself young but regularly trades in his leading ladies for younger and younger models, they are now on average 20 years younger than him. In previous MI films he would go off and stalk his wife, but she’s probably in her sixties now like he is, as is his first MI love interest Emmanuelle Béart, who never even got a look in as he keeps having flashbacks to the love interest before that. They are all interchangeable, slim tall willowy women, including the villain the White Widow, whom Grace impersonates when she slips on a mask and pretends to be her.
In the same way, when Top Gun got the reboot in Tom Gun: Maverick, everyone asked why Kelly McGillis wasn’t in it. She summed it up saying: I’m Old and I’m Fat, and I look Age-Appropriate. Again, he had a shipped in a younger model and went on as if Kelly hadn’t even existed. Even Meg Ryan had to get bumped off as he couldn’t have a woman the same age as him in the film, explaining the plot and asking him to stop acting like a child.
In MI:7, after Ilsa dies (again!) he has a moody moment then transfers his love and longing to his new squeeze Grace saying that her life will always matter more than his own, I think this is to show that he is such a man, a hero. Rather like, the Top Gun: Maverick which felt like such an old-fashioned film to be made in 2023. Men sweat at each other angrily instead of having proper conversations and women wait around ’til Tom has time to pay them a bootie call.
In contrast, Linda Hamilton said that she wanted to explore how Sarah Connor would be 27 years later. Who would she be as an older woman after saving the world? Oh my, me too. I wanted to know that story. And, the minute she climbed out of her car toting her big machine gun, I was all in. If anyone was going to be saving the saviours of humanity, it would be here, in an all female line-up, and we would talk about what was going on. When asked about the premiere about the women, Linda Hamilton said: It’s about what the world is ready to receive.
Tom is still in the 1980s, communicating via pager, and not receiving any of it, which is why we all love to play:
Tom Cruise Bingo
In every film, auld Tom:
1. Runs really fast by himself. 
2. Parachutes off a cliff/ a train/ an aeroplane/building. 3. Goes on a long motor bike ride. 4. Survives a plane crash/car crash/train crash/bomb blowing up. 5. Goes rogue and defies orders. 6. Says something and puts on sunglasses. 7. Expresses his feelings by taking off sunglasses. 8. Expresses intense feelings by sweating and clenching his jaw. 9. Emotes in a sunset scene in which he is often driving or floating or climbing off into the distance. 10. Saves the day by being the hero.
Nothing ever changes. And, since women very recently have stopped being positioned as objects to look at from the male gaze, in the movies of nowadays Tom is completely lost. If you go back to his earlier films he would ogle them. Nowadays he doesn’t know what to do, which is why there was that one awkward hug of him and Rebecca Ferguson on the balcony. One reviewer said they were fizzing with chemistry. It looked like an uncomfortable prepubescent moment to me, not least of all they have very young faces which cannot move at all, they will have to learn to emote like the avatars do on Fortnite so we know what is going on.
In contrast, Sarah Connor is full on, an older, prickly, difficult and paranoid, a takes-no-prisoners bloody brilliant woman, who has suffered at the hands of life, shoots terminators then drinks until she passes out. It takes her a while to move on from the old script that says it is a man who will save the world, and women give birth to such men. But she does, she gets it and says to Dani: You are John. And we all breathe a sign of relief that we are no longer stuck in 80s film land with women running around shrieking help me, biting people, bad boundaries and gratuitous sex scenes with time-travellers who our son’s best friends and soon-to-be father. I watched Terminator with my youngest and we spent the whole time going ugh, that’s not right.
Sadly Tom, lives in suspended animation, in the plot of the 1980s, thankfully without the ugh, that’s not right bits, but alas, no growth, no change, no development. It’s just him saving the world, like he did in Edge of Tomorrow, only in the MI franchise, which he has done it over two decades without a hint of him wanting something else. He doesn’t learn a thing, he doesn’t grow older, and he can’t even remember that he used to love all those women, someone switches him off at the end of the movie and reboots him at the start of the new one.
In Dark Fate, even the original terminator, Carl, has grown to understand what he did when he killed John Connor. He is also into fabrics which lends itself to a fabulous moment of comic relief when they are waiting for the new terminator, he is there describing how the curtains hang because of the cut and cloth in robotic detail and Sarah wants to shoot him again. Brilliant.
Technochauvinism and mansplaining
But it’s not all super bang-up to date in Dark Fate, as alas, the male counterparts in the film are AI self-aware new terminator men, or manly men action heroes, they are both still mansplaining their way through the film.
Terminator Carl knows what’s best for Sarah, as his texts give her life, purpose. That’s what he tells her. Cheeky mansplainer! I would have shot him too. And, Tom Cruise acts like Grace’s dad taking her out on her first driving lesson. She knows how to drive.
I’ve heard that the Fast X Rome road chase was much better and of course Uncharted the video game has the exact same train stunt, probably better as Sully is not mansplaining how to climb up it saying: It’s okay, it’s okay, trust me, I will save you, look at my muscles… and all that nonsense every two minutes.
Both Tom/Ethan and Arnie/Carl are brilliant examples of technochauvinism which is when we all think technology knows best, and chauvinism when of course, men know best.
At the end of Dark Fate, Carl is dying and Sarah, who swore that she would never call him Carl, is shouting at him to get up. He does so and it is such a poignant movement that we have hope there will be some resolution, but there isn’t. Dani is the heroine of the film, and she too loses her Grace, the augmented soldier, who came back to save her, but because she is human, she can only be superhuman for a short time, and Dani swears that she will save the world to save Grace from ever having to live that fate again. And, Sarah Connor is right there with her ready to save the world all over again for as many time as it needs saving.
In contrast, MI:7, we saw some great stunts, but I had stunt fatigue and too much monologuing as they kept blither-blathering: ultimate price, a new day new burden, the key is only the beginning, whatever it takes to get there, do it on your own… should you fail in your mission, the entity wins. Shurrup! The Grace there is left behind as Tom has to get on and she probably has to get a wardrobe change and a hairdo, or perhaps she will get swapped out too as she is getting on in years.
Everyone else is doubled down in a fully analogue safe room, from the cold war, running on vacuum tubes which haven’t been used since the invention of the transistor in 1948 because they blow out all the time and stop things working. In spite of all of this, the quality of the feed is as good as present day, not letting reality get in the way.
And Tom, has floated off in parachute made of old granny knickers and has the key because though he couldn’t beat Grace’s pickpocketing, he could beat Gabriel, even though Gabriel is one step ahead because he has the entity to guide him and can get erased in real time from CCTV. Tom is the best cos he said so.
So there we have it. I loved Dark Fate as there were so many older, wiser moments that made me laugh and cry and stirred me and I couldn’t believe the terminator was finally destroyed. The relief.
Sadly, I didn’t care by the end of MI:7 and had no idea what happened or what was supposed to happen, as it was too daft and the entity was too ridiculous and Gabriel such a hammy villain. It was like Terminator 3 when they played everything for laughs.
That said, we know that Tom will have to dive down into a submarine to switch off the entity and press a big red button and save the world. It will be worth watching for the stunts and the special effects, and to see if the AI goes truly bonkers and starts possessing the whales or making plastic bags all join together to save the oceans whilst becoming an AI possessed plastic deep sea dinosaur that tries to eat the submarine while Tom is in there pushing the red button. I hope so and I can’t wait.
In the meantime , I think the next time someone asks if AI is going to take over the world. I will say:
Not while Ethan Hunt is around. He’s got you.
And, everyone will feel better.
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