Since we discovered the third part of the “Mission Impossible” saga in 2006, this question has continued to tickle us: what exactly does the “rabbit’s foot” correspond to, which Tom Cruise must recover in the film?
Is Arnold Schwarzenegger dreaming everything that happens to him in Total Recall? What does Bill Murray whisper in Scarlet Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost in Translation? How did the Joker inherit the scars that scar his face in The Dark Knight?
There are many films that do not let you leave the cinema without having aroused your curiosity about a detail to which they refuse to provide an answer. Indeed, whether to awaken your imagination or to inspire Internet theorists, these feature films sometimes take great pleasure in ending with a question mark.
Even if it does not confuse its spectators as much as films like Inception or Total Recall can, the third part of the Mission Impossible saga, directed by JJ Abrams in 2006, in any case leaves enormous doubt about the one of the crucial elements of its plot.
What is the “rabbit’s foot”?
Indeed, at the end of the film, no one really knows what “the rabbit’s foot” is, this mysterious artifact coveted by the trafficker Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and which the agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has spent practically the entire feature film trying to find him.
Code name of an unidentified object that Davian must resell to a client for the modest sum of 850 million dollars (!!), this enigmatic qualifier very probably refers to a weapon of mass destruction, undoubtedly of a biological nature, even if there is nothing to confirm this hypothesis.
Paramount Pictures
“You have no idea what that is?”Ethan asks Benji Dunn, the technician from the Mission Impossible agency played by Simon Pegg.
Benji Dunn’s theory
The latter, unable to answer his question precisely, then refers to his professor of bimolecular kinetics and cellular dynamics at Oxford, explaining that the latter liked to scare first-year students by telling them about a technology capable of annihilating the world.
“It seemed inevitable that a complex would be created, which he always referred to as the ‘anti-god'”Benji explains to Ethan. “It was like an accelerated mutation, you know, like an irresistible force of destructive power that would eventually wipe out everything, the buildings, the parks, the streets, the children, the ice cream vendors. So every time I see like a bunch of misfits ready to spend such a sum of money on a mystery technology, I tell myself every time that it’s the ‘anti-god’, the end of the world, that kind of thing…”
Paramount Pictures
MacGuffin
This tirade from Benji on the supposed nature of the “rabbit’s foot” will unfortunately be the only information that will be provided to the viewer on this subject in the feature film.
Quite simply because the essence of this object ultimately has very little importance. It is in fact what we call in cinema a “MacGuffin”, that is to say a crucial element for the protagonists but which serves as a pretext for the story, and of which the spectators will never know Nothing. This was also the case of the famous Maltese Falcon in John Huston’s film, or even of Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase in Pulp Fiction.
Ultimately, all we need to know about the “Rabbit’s Foot” is that it is an extremely dangerous entity, and under no circumstances should it end up in Davian’s hands.
(Re)discover all the hidden details in “Mission Impossible 3″…