Tom Cruise's 'Ghost Protocol' decoded

So the next instalment of the Mission Impossible franchise now has a name.

"It is going to be 'Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol," lead actor and producer Tom Cruise said at a press conference at the Armani Hotel in Dubai on Thursday.

The hotel is in the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest tower, where Cruise and his team will spend a large portion of the three weeks they are in the emirate.

"I’ll be spending many days, many hours on the side of this building, I can’t give you details, but I will be up there," he told media.

He is joined by director Brad Bird, actors Paula Patton and Jeremy Renner and producer Bryan Burk. No one offered any details on what the ghost protocol in the film might be.

But predictably, the moment the name hit the Twitterverse, it was met with snorts of derision.

“Ghost Protocol sounds like a dumb video game,” Tweeted @kingnigel. TVWithoutPity said: “How awful. Might as well call it M:I - The Phantom Menace.”

48fps said: “M:I-Ghost Protocol. Gee, this title will self destruct in 5 seconds. I do hope Brad Bird delivers...”, while MikeDiPrisco  asked, “What's an Impossible Ghost Protocol?”

Whose ghost?

More than one user likened it to something thriller writer Tom Clancy might dream up.

But some quick online research threw up an interesting spin on what a ghost protocol might be.

One answer involves higher mathematics, where ghost packet protocols are used to streamline algorithms to improve their performance. Or so we think – we never paid any attention in intermediate mathematics class, and we’re guessing Cruise is too busy attending Scientology church to be spend any time on computer languages.

But then we found another, sexier answer.

Digital avatars

Blogger Thomas Petersen, who runs digital creative agency Hello out of Copenhagen, posted something about a ghost protocol in April:

“Ghosts are said to be trapped between the physical world and the afterlife. They lack physical properties yet still manifest themselves as alive and humanlike. They have a history; they used to be someone, someone who, although they no longer exist as flesh and bone, still carry the accumulated memories and knowledge of a past self," he writes.

“Could it be that these traces we leave behind at one level constitute the ghosts of our former selves? Could it be that these ghosts can manifest themselves in digital space as non-material versions of former me’s? Instead of being merely printed into the fabric of space-time and into the minds of others, might they also be printed into the fabric of the digital continuum and allow for a kind of transcendence?"

Now consider these ghosts represent our digital identity. Whatever we do, wherever we go, he says, our ghosts will build relationships with other ghosts. And over time, the amount of information we leave behind increases, and the ghosts become ever more indistinguishable from our physical selves. “Finally, as entropy takes its toll on your physical body, instead of “you” being an essay here, a wiki mention there and a tweet here, your entire life, your every move, is recorded into the fabric of the digital “space-time” continuum where it continues to live, only this time to be revisited by later generations.”

In Petersen’s book, then, such a ghost protocol is all about immortality. To take that plot further, all you need do is imagine what happens when those protocols interact with others to the detriment of humanity.

We’re loving that explanation – but if Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec and JJ Abrams wrote anything similar into the original story of “Mission Impossible 4”, we’re bored already. Are we the only people to see a similarity to “Minority Report”? Not to mention "Inception", with all the work on different levels. Been there, done that, watched the movie.

Keith J Fernandez is Arts & Life Editor of Emirates247.com 

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