Top Gun: Maverick
★★★★★
No spoilers
I have only seen the original once decades ago. I only remember the bare gist of the plot. There’s a bunch of hotshot Navy pilots. Something happens and someone dies. The song Take My Breath Away played while some people are having sex, or a bunch of sweaty naked men were playing volleyball, or both at the same time, I can’t really remember. There was a jet fighter battle, the heroes blow up the bad guys, the end. Stars Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise’s smile. You can see that I had a lot of expectations going into the sequel. But I came out of Top Gun Maverick with a list of things that I didn’t expect to discover in this film.
First, I didn’t expect this not to be a blatant sequel cash grab. It is still obviously a sequel cash grab, but a blatant one wouldn’t have cared about the story. This one did. The mission was intriguing and thrilling. Maverick has an emotional character arc. The whole training bit was not boring at all. They even bothered throwing in a twist or three. And I even liked the love story. I was not expecting to get the feels, but there were a few moments that got my eyes welling. Yeah, the sequel to Top Gun made me want to un-ironically cry, the world has gone mad!
I also didn’t expect to like the characters, especially Maverick who I thought was going to be the same smug and cocky guy from the first film. But he has aged and is a little different here, and Cruise did a phenomenal job portraying him. Also, I was more than ready to dislike Miles Teller and Glen Powell’s characters, who also seemed like smug a-holes at first, but now I’m fans. Connelly’s great, so was Hamm, the supporting cast, and a few others for you to discover yourselves.
Also did not expect a large chunk of the aerial sequences, the main selling point of the movie, to not be fully CG. They could have just saved the money and went 100% green screens, but they actually shot a ton of footages of the actors strapped into in real jet fighters doing actual aerial maneuvers that their facial reactions to the intense G-force were actually real! I’m pretty sure there were a number of CG shots but they blended in with the practical shots seamlessly that I didn’t notice. There’s something about shooting things practical that your brain just instinctively knows it’s real, and it adds realism to the sequences, which also heightened the thrills and excitement. It also helped that the action finale was very well thought out and was properly set up throughout the film in such a way that even us, the audiences could understand the tasks and the stakes at hand when it finally happens.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing really groundbreaking to be found here. But it’s just such a very well put together blockbuster film, and I haven’t felt such sheer enjoyment for a film in this way for a long time. It’s a high recommendation from me for sure.
Originally published on my Facebook Page, here.