Top Gun: Maverick. (12A.)
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
Starring Tom Cruise, Jennifer Connelly, Miles Teller, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Ed Harris and Val Kilmer. 131 mins.
Top Gun 2 opens like it can’t bear to leave the eighties. Just like in the original, the credits proclaim it as a Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer production, even though Simpson died in 1996. The exact same written scroll in the same font explains what the Top Gun academy is. Over shots of an aircraft carrier Harold Faltermeyer’s original opening theme gives way to Kenny Loggins's "Danger Zone." Sat in the auditorium watching this I felt something very strange and disturbing – affectionate nostalgia for a film I hate.
The original was the archetypal evil eighties film; the decade where it all went wrong. It was a celebration of strident militarism and the ugly American First of Reaganomics. Then there was director Tony Scott’s reductive visual style and cattle prod storytelling technique. And fronting it all was Little Tom with his smug grin, a mascot for US Imperialism. Eighties Hollywood – it wasn’t all Spielberg and Back to the Future. This was the era when the studios were bought up by the conglomerates and most of it was wretched, formulaic and soulless.
This sequel is exactly the same film, but entirely different. This time Cruise's Maverick is called back to the Top Gun academy to train the best of the best to perform a mission to take out an illegal uranium enrichment plant in a geo-politically vague location. Outside of that, he has to seduce Jennifer Connelly and deal with Rooster (Teller) the son of Goose, the man he got killed in the first film. Predictable doesn't come into it.
So how can it be that Top Gun in the 21st century is such wonderful entertainment, almost a breath of fresh air? Firstly, the aerial scenes look magnificent, especially on an Imax screen. It claims no CGI was used and seeing a film full of actual things that are actually there actually doing things is a thrill. So it looks real, but it also feels human. These characters are two dimensional at best and the storytelling is perfunctory, but you connect to them. Cruise is still unbearably pleased with himself but now he has three and half decades of hard graft behind him to justify his self enchantment.
Disturbingly, I think Top Gun 2 works because over the past three decades Hollywood has perfected the spirit-crushing formulaic approach to filmmaking that they started to embrace back in the eighties. They no longer make “good” films (evidence; the last decade or so of Oscar winners) but they can make the dumb films really, really well.
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
Starring Tom Cruise, Jennifer Connelly, Miles Teller, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Ed Harris and Val Kilmer. 131 mins.
Top Gun 2 opens like it can’t bear to leave the eighties. Just like in the original, the credits proclaim it as a Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer production, even though Simpson died in 1996. The exact same written scroll in the same font explains what the Top Gun academy is. Over shots of an aircraft carrier Harold Faltermeyer’s original opening theme gives way to Kenny Loggins's "Danger Zone." Sat in the auditorium watching this I felt something very strange and disturbing – affectionate nostalgia for a film I hate.
The original was the archetypal evil eighties film; the decade where it all went wrong. It was a celebration of strident militarism and the ugly American First of Reaganomics. Then there was director Tony Scott’s reductive visual style and cattle prod storytelling technique. And fronting it all was Little Tom with his smug grin, a mascot for US Imperialism. Eighties Hollywood – it wasn’t all Spielberg and Back to the Future. This was the era when the studios were bought up by the conglomerates and most of it was wretched, formulaic and soulless.
This sequel is exactly the same film, but entirely different. This time Cruise's Maverick is called back to the Top Gun academy to train the best of the best to perform a mission to take out an illegal uranium enrichment plant in a geo-politically vague location. Outside of that, he has to seduce Jennifer Connelly and deal with Rooster (Teller) the son of Goose, the man he got killed in the first film. Predictable doesn't come into it.
So how can it be that Top Gun in the 21st century is such wonderful entertainment, almost a breath of fresh air? Firstly, the aerial scenes look magnificent, especially on an Imax screen. It claims no CGI was used and seeing a film full of actual things that are actually there actually doing things is a thrill. So it looks real, but it also feels human. These characters are two dimensional at best and the storytelling is perfunctory, but you connect to them. Cruise is still unbearably pleased with himself but now he has three and half decades of hard graft behind him to justify his self enchantment.
Disturbingly, I think Top Gun 2 works because over the past three decades Hollywood has perfected the spirit-crushing formulaic approach to filmmaking that they started to embrace back in the eighties. They no longer make “good” films (evidence; the last decade or so of Oscar winners) but they can make the dumb films really, really well.
