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Review of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (Max Aruj/Alfie Godfrey)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... to hear the anthemic muscularity and themes of Lorne
Balfe's prior music in the franchise without the abrasive manipulation
and synthetic edge that came along with him.
Avoid it... if it's precisely that edgy, mechanical personality that attracted you to Balfe's music, the livelier mix and more enthusiastic performances in this entry likely to achieve crossover appeal with older fans of the Lalo Schifrin themes.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning: (Max
Aruj/Alfie Godfrey) Perhaps eight will be enough Mission:
Impossible movies, especially with star Tom Cruise now in his 60's,
but one can never bet against a massively successful,
multi-billion-dollar franchise. The 2025 entry, Mission: Impossible -
The Final Reckoning wraps the action witnessed in the
now-inconveniently named Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part
One from 2023. A rogue artificial intelligence called "The Entity"
becomes sentient and decides to unleash the world's nuclear arsenal on
humanity, which had not been an original concept for decades but
apparently still appeals to people. The government agents of Impossible
Missions Force and the terrorist in league with the AI spend this entire
movie doing much the same as in the prior one: chasing. The protagonists
have to stop the nuclear holocaust while also trapping the AI so it
can't join forces with Elon Musk next. All the evidence an informed mind
needs to identify these films as drivel comes from the casting of Angela
Bassett as the American president, because, as the whole world is well
aware, there's no chance that a distinguished and buff black woman would
ever be elected to lead that bigoted country. Viewers just want to see
Cruise do his stunts, however, and they are highly praised in
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, helping push the movie
towards continued box office riches. The music for the eight films in
this franchise has never enjoyed much consistency outside of the legacy
of Lalo Schifrin's surviving themes from the original television series.
Those provided by Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer, and Lorne Balfe tended to
underachieve for differing reasons, while the two by Michael Giacchino
were middling at best. None could compete with Joe Kraemer's masterful
score for 2015's Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, which
remains easily the best music in the concept. Although Balfe was
originally slated to return for Mission: Impossible - The Final
Reckoning to logically extend the sound of the prior film's music,
the new score is credited to Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey, who have been
regular Balfe ghostwriters.
When you have a composer like Balfe emulating Zimmer and essentially running a very well-staffed production house for film music, one never knows who wrote exactly what in a particular score, and situations in which some of the secondary writers were contractually forced to take primary credit on a score have occurred. On the other hand, it's possible that Balfe did bow out of significant duties for this assignment. Regardless, the end product is pleasantly surprising. Aruj, Godfrey, and their crew manage to work within the guardrails of both Balfe's general sound and Schifrin's continued influence, improving upon the tone of Balfe's music especially. Certainly, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One was a stylistic improvement over the tiresome Balfe anonymity for Mission: Impossible - Fallout, and the general movement between those scores to more organic tones continues with good results. This music sounds like Balfe as expected, but its rendering cleans up the detrimental aspects of that composer's methodologies and provides a more palatable presentation of the same ideas. Most importantly, the presence of synthetics is dialed back, with outright, obnoxious manipulation almost absent, and this decision allows the throwback Schifrin sequences to carry more authenticity. The well-harmonized orchestral presence in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is enhanced by a more generously acoustic mix that flourishes minus unnecessary amounts of processing. The actual instrumentation is similar, the brass especially muscular but conveyed with a jazzier inflection in the main theme's retro performances. The use of flutes is improved after the prior score finally allowed woodwinds at all in the Balfe mould. Mandatory tom-tom drums for the concept return to better form this time, and the marching band-like percussion that was mercilessly hyped with the prior score is restrained to more sensible levels here. New accents for this entry include throat singers for the Arctic setting and balalaikas for the Russian ones. These specialty instruments and the many choral applications throughout are seemingly buried in the mix in many instances, however, the brass and strings afforded preference at almost every moment when percussion isn't outwardly showcased. Still, the presence of these sonic colors is appreciated. One of the biggest detriments that film music collectors will cite about Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is the lack of any callbacks to the previous scores in the franchise, particularly the 1996 one from Elfman. But given the relative lack of quality throughout these scores, sticking to Balfe's ideas is understandable. There is enough emotional variance to sustain a longer listening experience, the more openly anthemic portions especially solid and highlighted by "Martial Law" and "Mt Weather." The album for the score runs over two hours long, but there are no really undesirable cues that are difficult to digest in that surprisingly tonal experience. The "Firefight" cue being the roughest emulation of Balfe synthetics, other parts may be excessive simply because they are comparatively dull. The creepy ambient effect of "The Sevastopol" (including heartbeat sound) offers little to the narrative outside of immediate needs, and slight cues like "Consequences" and "Your Final Reckoning" could be cropped. But whereas Balfe had a tendency to annoy or even cause pain to the ears with his action mode, Aruj and Godfrey remarkably avoid that pitfall of the genre. Thematically, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning achieves what it needs to and remains faithful to the melodies it requires to thrive. Of the two Balfe themes lingering from Mission: Impossible - Fallout, the one for Ethan Hunt's suffering persists while the generalized villain identity for Syndicate does not. From Balfe's Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, the theme for The Entity and Gabriel returns as well. Both the two classic Schifrin themes are given significant attention as well. The composers also devise a new dramatic theme for the character connections of this particular story, making the narrative pretty well developed overall. The suffering theme for Hunt hails back to the "We Are Never Free" cue by Balfe and is anchored by three slowly descending notes. At this point, though, it blends in with the main Schifrin theme's common constructs, so any elongated presentation of the latter inherently achieves an overlapping purpose with the suffering theme. On its own, this idea is most prominent in the middles of "I'll Be Waiting" and "Ascending" and during the culmination of "We'll Figure It Out." It achieves some bloated agony in the sequence from "Liftoff" to "Good Luck," offers a bit of closure in "A Light We Cannot See," and returns to its piano roots to bring the theme home in "This is My Mission." The theme for the villains in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning alternates between two notes of mystery at its base form and is a derivative of Schifrin's "The Plot" theme. Its pairs of notes are heard immediately in "Origins" with lightly suspenseful tones and continue more ominously over the main theme in "It Will Change You." It's slight in "The Entity," twisting into an ascending alternative of menace, and underpins the melodrama of the main theme in "The Entity's Future." This AI and Gabriel theme taunts in "Checkmate," offers good ambient dread over voices in "The Eye of the Storm," and shifts to being intriguingly redemptive in "I Have No Regrets." This idea has never really stood out in any of the scores, and it retains more of an atmospheric stance in this entry as well. The addition to this work by Aruj and Godfrey comes with a newly explored, dramatic character theme, one that is anonymously pleasant but pretty, itself based on the suffering theme and thus dating back to the main Schifrin one by association. This theme stews in "Another Sunrise," develops more volume late in "This is Where You Leave Me," and gains its fullest rendition in "I Owe You My Life." It previews the main theme early in "Descending" and becomes propulsive for a major crescendo in "For Those We Never Meet." Many casual listeners won't even notice any consistent, narrative connectivity between the performances of any of the above themes in this score, though, and that's fine. The main theme and "The Plot" theme by Schifrin, who was in his 90's at the time of this score's writing, are so well known by audiences that their interpolations are really what matter. To the composers' credit, those adaptations are increasingly intelligent in this work. More interesting for music lovers is arguably "The Plot" theme, which enters the equation in this score as it guides the action rhythms of "Come Home Ethan" and "Enter Paris." It punctuates the staccato action in "It's Only Pain," plays nicely against the main theme in "The Eye of the Storm," cranks up the force in "Firefight," and is cleverly pitted against the main theme in "We'll Figure It Out." It opens "Liftoff" in skittish form before consolidating strongly later for a brief moment, forms an elongated rhythm at the outset of "Decisions," and enjoys a fuller performance in "This is Not Good." In one of the bonus tracks on the album, this theme is supplied a somewhat synthetic-sounding but nicely harmonized rendition during "The Arctic." Aruj and Godfrey allow the theme its occasional moments of inherent pomposity a few times in the score, which will be a crowd-pleaser. Also likely to win over audiences is the composers' treatment of Schifrin's main franchise theme in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. The two notes of the "answer" phrase of the theme are extended to a second pair for additional drama, and these applications work wonders for the idea's impact. The composers reprise the prior score's percussive stance in the full outburst for the theme in "We Live and Die in the Shadows." After assuming a fragmentary role in the second half of "Come Home Ethan," the lively, traditional performance in "Main Titles" has Giacchino flair to its brass inflection, a great nod to the past. Equally impressive is the composers' ability to adapt the theme into a muscular anthem at the outset of "Martial Law," which debuts the elongated ending; the secondary sequence of the theme is featured nicely here as well, the entirety sped up for a ballsy rendition over its baseline later. The main theme shifts to a tool of ambient horror in the latter half of "Origins" and "It Will Change You" before returning to full action mode in its adapted, quasi-suffering form in "I'll Be Waiting." It's slowed for maximum dramatic emphasis in "I Know You" while the militaristic take recurs on brass and chopping strings in "Mt Weather" and "Nothing is Certain," a mode that continues in the latter half of "The Eye of the Storm." Increasingly dramatic on strings and eventually choir in "The Icecap," the idea rumbles under the haze in "The Sevastopol," dominates "We'll Figure It Out" with incredibly powerful brass resonance, and doubles for the suffering identity in "Ascending" and with nice piano accents in the impressive "Liftoff." Pieces of the theme run the whole spectrum of emotions in "Decisions" before it becomes massive with percussive backing at the start of "Problems." It's barely evident in the worry of "Ten Seconds... Maybe" and respectfully restrained in the first half of "Descending." As expected, the theme achieves a nice conclusive resolution from espionage subtlety to full swing in "Curtain Call." In the album's bonus tracks, the main theme punctuates the building intensity of "For Those We Never Meet," is pitted well against the "Plot" theme in the somewhat demo-like "The Arctic," and repeats the titles performance mode in "Encore." The album ends with "Final Reckoning - Sacrifice Teaser," which matches the score well. As mentioned before, that product is very long, but it sustains the listening experience surprisingly well. That's because the performances are fun and lively, with a mix that doesn't attempt to hide it. The muscularity of Balfe's style works well without his more abrasive habits, and while this score cannot compete with Kraemer's fantastic entry, it's more enjoyable than the remainder. ****
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 124:29
NOTES & QUOTES:
There exists no official packaging for this album.
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