The closing ceremony of the 2024 Olympics marked the handing over of the Olympic flag from the city of Paris to the city of Los Angeles in a very L.A. way. Live-action Tom Cruise abseiled off the roof of the Stade de France and headed out on a motorcycle. Then we switched over to footage of him jumping out of a plane, running over some hills and climbing up the Hollywood sign. It was “Mission: Possible,” as one announcer suggested, signifying that the upcoming 2028 Olympics will be a fusion of the athletes’ physical feats and the showbiz town’s trademark entertainment spectacle.

This was not only a peppy pro-Olympics message. It was quintessential Tom Cruise.

In the COVID-era slump, he was credited with “saving the movies” with the in-theatre experiences of Top Gun: Maverick and later Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One, the kind of big, blasting blockbusters where the visual images are eye-popping and you can feel the audio vibrating in your chest.

Tom Cruise was lowered into the stadium during the 2024 Summer Olympics closing ceremony at the Stade de France last Sunday. (Martin Meissner / The Associated Press

Both of these flicks also pumped up the fact Cruise is a physical actor who insists on doing his own action sequences. Whether he’s battling G-forces in fighter jets or driving a motorbike off a Norwegian cliff, Cruise is seen as proof that individual flesh-and-blood movie stars still matter, that practical stunts are more compelling than CGI and that AI will never overcome “realness.”

Cruise, of course, is a somewhat unlikely emblem of realness. First off, the 62-year-old star’s refusal to age — in any way at all — feels a bit unnatural. And Cruise’s genuine personality remains elusive. His opinions and feelings are cryptic, and when he does express them publicly, the results come off as inauthentic and off-putting. (Think of his alarmingly ecstatic couch-jumping on Oprah in 2005 or that creepy leaked Scientology video from 2008.)

The way Cruise connects to his global fans is through physical action, specifically the risk-taking, death-daunting, kooky-dangerous kind. This is how he gets real. When Cruise makes movies, he sacrifices himself for our entertainment. He suffers for our cinema-going pleasure. There have always been implicit pacts between Hollywood stars and their fans, but this feels like a particularly tricky bargain.

Cruise kicked off this trend with a lot of “running really fast” action. (The YouTube super-cut of Tom Cruise running in the Mission: Impossible series is over nine minutes long, and it’s impressive.) He amped things up with motorcycle riding, rock climbing, skydiving and clinging to the sides of planes.

Cruise has climbed the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. He has trained in zero gravity. He has learned how to pilot a helicopter and pull off a corkscrew dive. He has completed HALO (high altitude, low opening) parachute jumps. He has held his breath for six minutes underwater.

There are drawbacks to the star-as-his-own-stuntman model. Cruise broke his ankle jumping between buildings during the filming of 2018’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout. The injury delayed production for months, costing the studio an estimated $70 million.

But if Cruise’s absence costs millions, his onscreen presence brings in millions more for the worldwide box office.

The studio uses Cruise’s stunts in their marketing, even when those stunts are kind of unnecessary. That six-minute underwater breath-holding scene in Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, for instance, is really something.

But it’s not as if the sequence is one long unbroken take. There are multiple cuts, which means there are points when Cruise could have come up for air, like a regular person. Even with practical stunt work, there are camera tricks and clever editing to make things easier. They call it movie magic for a reason.

Cruise’s insistence on putting his body on the line — even when he doesn’t have to — feels like a deliberate and defiant statement. It’s part of his movie-star brand, of course, and in that sense it’s self-serving.

But Cruise is also connecting to something bigger. As the indiscriminate use of crappy CGI results in action sequences that feel flat, frictionless and consequence-free, as digital fakery and AI-generated content become even more ubiquitous, Cruise recognizes audiences want to feel there’s something human at stake.

It seems significant that in the current Mission: Impossible flicks, Cruise’s nemesis is a rogue artificial-intelligence program known only as The Entity.

According to an unusually upbeat analysis of how AI will be used in film, “AI is revolutionizing film production by automating various tasks such as script analysis, video editing, CGI generation and even virtual actors. It is streamlining workflows, reducing costs and enabling filmmakers to create unique and engaging content.”

By 2025, when Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part Two is released, various AI entities will probably be contributing to mediocre movies — and maybe causing all sorts of Black Mirror-ish havoc.

But at least Tom Cruise will still be running and jumping and climbing and parachuting — for real.