When I began this Notebook blog two summer ago, my first post was titled “Maybe You Should Give That Film/Book/Album a Second Chance.” In it I argued that “so often, the first viewing/reading/listening is for finding out what the film/book/album is not. It isn’t until the second viewing/reading/listening that I can begin to appreciate what the film/book/album actually is.”

At the time of writing that post, the work that was at the top of my mind and prompting these reflections was Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, which I had seen in the theater a few weeks prior. I went into that film with high expectations and came out feeling somewhat disappointed. At the same time, I strongly suspected I would need to give it another try. Having recently rewatched Dead Reckoning in preparation to see its follow-up, The Final Reckoning, I can confirm that Dead Reckoning was worth the second chance, and I look forward to giving it a third and a fourth. There is more going on in that film than I could appreciate on a first viewing.

I didn’t mention Dead Reckoning or any other film or book or album in that post, since the point there was to describe the hermeneutic principle and not to argue for the merits of any particular misunderstood or underrated work. But when my friend Timothy Lawrence wrote a similar post about unreliable first impressions to inaugurate his blog, he did cite Dead Reckoning as one of his examples. So, funnily enough, we both started blogs in the summer of 2023 while mulling over how Dead Reckoning challenged us to move beyond first impressions.

Now that The Final Reckoning is out and Tim and I have both seen it, the added irony is that reflecting on this new film has prompted both of us to consider the corollary of that principle I repeated at the top. If the audience shouldn’t rely too much on its first impressions of a work, then the corollary is that the makers of that work shouldn’t rely too much on the audience’s first impressions, either.

As I wrote in my Letterboxd review of The Final Reckoning, the film’s director “Christopher McQuarrie said they made substantial changes to this film after the underwhelming responses to Dead Reckoning … I wish they had stuck to their guns, because this finale did not provide the payoff I was hoping for after all the exciting possibilities set up by its predecessor.” Now, to be consistent with the first principle, I’ll acknowledge I’ve only seen The Final Reckoning once and may yet change my mind about it. As I said already in the Letterboxd post, “It may grow on me as Dead Reckoning has.” But right now my inclination is to say that, by being too sensitive to initial audience reactions to Dead Reckoning and by being too eager to please the audience with The Final Reckoning, McQuarrie failed to carry over into The Final Reckoning the elements that made Dead Reckoning a great film. I’d add that Tim, who has seen The Final Reckoning multiple times now (and therefore is not as tied to a first impression as I still am), is of the same mind. In a recent blog post, he writes that “The Final Reckoning’s determination to be ‘for the audience’ is its greatest weakness.” (I recommend reading the whole post, “Is Art for the Artist or the Audience?”) The Final Reckoning is to some degree a failure because McQuarrie thought that Dead Reckoning failed—and that because the initial audience said so or implied as much. If McQuarrie had made The Final Reckoning closer to the way he had envisioned it before audiences reacted negatively to Dead Reckoning, it may have garnered similar negative reactions, but it might have gained a stronger chance of standing the test—or should I say reckoning—of time.