In 1996, in the first installment of the saga Mission: ImpossibleEthan Hunt, the character played by Tom Cruise, was just another agent on a mission in Prague that goes awry. Three decades and seven installments later, Tom Cruise is no longer just another star, nor is Ethan Hunt just another secret agent. The actor has become a kind of messiah of entertainment cinema designed to be projected on the big screen and with impressive scenes shot in real locations, and Hunt is now an almost mythological hero with the manifest destiny of making the impossible possible and saving the world from certain destruction. Such a heavy burden to carry that only an actor with Cruise's almost pathological self-esteem and determination could have taken on without the film descending into ridicule.