Naturally, he decided to do both. Because that’s the thing about Tom Cruise: He may believe that Xenu is real, and that “Battlefield Earth” was a historical epic, but the one thing he doesn’t believe in is compromise.
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He breaks down a character he’s played for 22 years and rebuilds him over the course of an epic summer blockbuster that’s explicitly about one man’s struggle to choose between saving his friends and saving the world. The resulting film immortalizes Cruise as one of the greatest action stars of this (or any) era, while also cementing his genius for emotional expression. Not only is this his best work since the late ’90s, one of the standout performances of 2018, and worthy of serious consideration for a Best Actor nod at the Oscars (hell, it deserves to win), but what Cruise accomplishes in “Fallout” is reason enough for the Academy to finally reconsider its long-standing blindness to action movie acting. Weather the storm? Tom Cruise is the storm.