One of the impossibly magical gizmos that Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt and his teammates rely on in "Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol" is a tiny eye camera that sits on top of the cornea and uploads images to a remote computer. Watching the IMAX version was like wearing a pair of them, and now, the morning after, it's as if they're still beaming images to my brain. I can't vouch for the merely wide-screen version that opens next week, but the action sequences shot in IMAX—one-quarter of the film opening today—lift this fourth installment of the near-venerable series from impressive action to spectacular abstraction. It's not the generic plot that's so memorable, even though its convolutions are clever enough, or the cast of mostly interesting characters, but the surreal swirl of form and color that frequently fills the enormous screen.

The best stuff transpires, and perspires, in Dubai. What brings the IMF team to that emirate's skyscrapered sands is their search for a madman who plans to launch a nuclear missile that will plunge the world into nuclear war. (If the plot was good enough for James it's good enough for Ethan.) The search starts in Moscow, where the team is wrongly blamed for a blast that destroys much of the Kremlin—not just blamed but officially disavowed and effectively reduced to the status of ghostly rogues—and it extends to Mumbai by way of fulfilling the franchise's supercharged-travelogue function.

Still, Dubai is where Ethan scales the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, and where the IMAX camera records his human-fly escapade in wondrously dense yet expansive detail. One shot alone is almost worth the price of admission: it's when Ethan goes out a window and the camera follows him, then pivots and soars above him to take in the building, the climber and the whole panorama of urbanized desert.

"Ghost Protocol" is the live-action debut of Brad Bird, who has directed no less than three animated masterpieces: "The Iron Giant," "The Incredibles" and "Ratatouille." This film is no masterpiece; all-too-familiar elements of the action-adventure genre animate the script by André Nemec and Josh Appelbaum. But Mr. Bird and his cinematographer, Robert Elswit, sustain a remarkable level of visual and dramatic energy in scenes that exult in exotic settings, edgy architecture and quirky behavior. (The production designer was James D. Bissell. Michael Giacchino did the powerful score. The editor was Paul Hirsch.)

In a tale that also relies on face-recognition gizmos—they're deployed as casually as dental floss—the most readily recognizable face belongs to the star, whose features have matured and coarsened with the passage of time. He's become an abstraction too, an eerily Tom Cruise-like figure who runs, jumps, smiles and frowns with a devotion to IMF duty that's always entertaining and sometimes downright touching.

The excellent actors around him include Jeremy Renner as Brandt, an agent who knows more about what's possible than he lets on (and who may take Ethan's place in the franchise should Mr. Cruise refuse any more of these missions); Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn, the team's whimsical computer whiz; Paula Patton as the buff and fearless Agent Jane Carter; Michael Nyqvist as the megalomaniacal villain, Hendricks (it's not the fault of Mr. Nyqvist, who played the journalist in the original Swedish screen adaptation of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, that this villain, as written, is insufficiently villainous); Anil Kapoor (the volcanic quiz show host in "Slumdog Millionaire") as a lecherous Mumbai billionaire; and most mysteriously, because most seductively without visible effort, Léa Seydoux as a dangerously for-profit operative named Sabine Moreau.

The movie's schizoid attitude toward its fancy technology mirrors our own. On the one hand the IMF team members know just as well as we do that intricate systems and machines are vulnerable to intricate failure; their efforts to avert nuclear annihilation fail ignominiously before they succeed. On the other hand, they invest those machines with limitless power, just as we are more than willing to go along with breaking access codes instantly, locating quarries almost infallibly (even in a sand storm), taking over the entire operation of an immense building by hacking its central computer, or rendering an alternate reality—as in the computer-animation sense of rendering—with little more than a laptop and a portable screen. "Mission: Impossible" has always been about alternate realities, and this episode gave Mr. Bird a chance to render a huge one with live people as his incredibles. The result is hugely enjoyable.