While it is true that Ethan Hunt survives the events of the eighth “Mission: Impossible,” it’s not for lack of putting himself in harm’s way. As in the previous film, Ethan’s key mission in this entry is to face off against and hopefully destroy the Entity, an enigmatic and seemingly all-powerful AI that is in the process of controlling the nuclear arsenal of all major countries in the world. There is, as usual, a ticking clock; Ethan has three days to stop the Entity before the President of the United States (Angela Bassett, reprising her role from “Mission: Impossible – Fallout”) threatens to fire a pre-emptive strike against other countries in the hopes of deterring the Entity further. And there are, as usual, death-defying stunts that Ethan has to perform to help achieve his mission. Although the marketing has leaned heavily on the biplane sequence that serves as a chunk of the film’s climax, the most dangerous stunt seems to appear at the midpoint, as Ethan goes hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean to retrieve the Entity’s source code, buried deep in a long-defunct Russian submarine. That extended sequence, taking place in relative silence, pushes Ethan to the brink to the point where he has to be revived at length by pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell).

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But there, and at the end after Ethan has successfully linked the Entity to a “poison pill” that will help destroy its internal mechanism, Ethan manages to avoid the specter of death. It’s arguably not the first time we, as an audience, have been made to wonder if this is Ethan Hunt’s last impossible mission. He’s been revived from the brink of death in “Mission: Impossible III,” and he’s only just barely averted nuclear apocalypse in the aforementioned 2018 entry, “Mission: Impossible – Fallout.” (On a smaller scale, he did the same at the end of “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” where a well-timed disarming of a nuclear bomb avoided catastrophe in San Francisco.) And yet, Ethan keeps kicking, often with a slightly reconfigured version of his IMF team. In that respect, this “Final” film is no different, with Ethan last glimpsed in London, giving weighty nods to Benji (Simon Pegg), Grace, Paris (Pom Klementieff), and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis). If there’s a ninth film, these would no doubt be his counterparts on whatever comes next.

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But what can come next for Ethan Hunt, that hasn’t been seen before? No doubt the stunts in this movie are insane and awe-inspiring and terrifying, in equal measure. But this movie, perhaps fittingly like the Entity itself, seems self-aware enough to not only reference earlier films deliberately through dialogue and plot, but through those stunts. (There have been so many dangerous stunts in the franchise that we’ve ranked them here.) Ethan having to do something incredibly insane underwater happened quite memorably in the mid-film action sequence in “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” and “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” climaxes with a crazy action sequence in which Ethan climbs up one helicopter to chase down the main bad guy, who’s flying another chopper. The stunts here do not feel like lazy retreads, but the similarities are impossible (natch) to ignore. Ethan Hunt may not die here, but maybe this should be the end of the “Mission: Impossible” series.