Top Gun: Maverick
starring Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, Jennifer Connelly, John Hamm, Miles Teller, Monica Barbaro, Bashir Salahuddin, Glenn Powell, Charles Parnell and Val Kilmer
directed by Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy, Oblivion, a few other things)
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Tony Scott is dead. It wasn't that recently anymore either, like a full decade since. But it's not just that he himself has passed, it's that Tony Scott is dead kind of as a cinematic idea. I don't want to be reductive because the guy was insanely prolific, in both film and television. He had his hands in a lot of things, some of them very broadminded and groundbreaking. It's just that the things he was known for, the things that really put him in the public consciousness had a few very specific things in common: vibrating cameras inside things going very fast, super close-ups of very intense eyes, machines going some version of FUCKINVROOOM!, and men doing men stuff, normally with other men.
Crimson Tide. Days of Thunder. True Romance. The Last Boy Scout. Beverly Hills Cop II. Two of his last ones were Man on Fire and Unstoppable, more specifically about Denzel Washington being a man in his own particularly masculine idiom. And, of course, the 1986 airplane porn classic Top Gun.
When the sequel was announced, that was the first thing I thought: Tony Scott is dead. So therefore the sequel can't possibly be the anything like the same experience. It was an observation to neither lament nor celebrate, merely to mark and prepare myself to probably ignore this thing completely when it was finally released.
I remembered the first one of course. I was a 12 year old (at that time, almost certainly) heterosexual boy when it was released. Pretty much the target audience, I thought, until I got older and understood how demographic cross-appeal worked. It's a credit to the vision of Tony Scott that he understood so much more deeply than 12-year-old me could that with one volleyball and enough baby oil, you could really make something for everyone.
It's not that I wasn't hyped for the new one because I was worried it was going to be "wussified," to use a Tucker Carlson-ism. The original could have used a lot less testosterone and maybe a female character or seven that wasn't there to be boned, complained to or sad in reaction to the protagonist. Well, that's probably the wrong use of the word "protagonist." Tom Cruise got a lot of screen time, but I don't think I'd get a lot of pushback if I suggested the driving force at the center of the plot was the sound a jet engine makes.
I did go see the sequel in theaters, but it was mostly the idea of my youngest boy, who is 19, which was weird. He'd never seen the original, but I guess the sound of a jet engine is one of those primordial sounds that redound across the generational, genetic memory. As a bit of a refresher (and to be sure he knew what he was getting in to), we screened the 1986 original and it was... well, it's not a film by any definition except maybe literally, but it sure as hell is a fucking movie. And very specifically a Tony Scott movie.
There aren't any scenes that aren't masculine posturing. Everyone is wet all the time (I am not kidding, just beads and beads of water on then when they're just sitting in meetings, no shit). I think I concluded instinctively the first time through that it lacked subtlety and nuance, but the second time through I realized what I missed: Iceman is right about everything. He's nominally the antagonist,* but all he does is spit inarguable koans of zen truth that only sound like obstacles for the hero until you finally realize you'd misidentified the hero all along. Yeah, he does that weird-ass gum-chomp meme face, but I spent most of that afternoon going "goddamn, that Maverick really is a danger to his team..."
I remember Tron: Legacy and I've re-seen it since it sort of confounded me in theaters. I like it more and more the farther I get from the initial screening for some reason. It's heady and weird and stoic, but also at some points gonzo and confrontational. So I don't mind Joseph Kosinski. But he's not Tony Scott. And that really shows.
Not in a bad way. There's way less resting sweat in this one. There's a fucking shit-ton more talking, which is not necessarily a bad thing, except in this case it was enough to establish that Tom Cruise was definitely the protagonist of this much more conventional film. The original was a tone poem dedicated to the barely controlled explosive violence of a jet engine. This was a long-form "talk to your doctor..." ad about aging with an inconvenient surfeit of testosterone.
The cast was pretty good. Tom Cruise had the most to do of course, including the obligatory running and motorcycle riding, so he was fine. John Hamm was wasted as a three-star speed bump. Jennifer Connelly was a lot more interesting than Kelly McGillis' character from the original, but in retrospect she had like four very short scenes in the whole thing and half her lines were "Pete Mitchell," so it was a low bar. Miles Teller was perfectly cast, though his character had a weird emotional arc (like he's 35 and they never talked about stuff that happened when he was like 17? That's what we're confronting, now?). He looks so much like Anthony Edwards, my kid was trying to figure out how they got the same actor to look so young.
This wasn't a bad movie. It was definitely more of a film. It made some stabs at having things like "emotional arcs" for example. The flying parts were really fun and beautifully, inventively shot, even if the central mission and method for attempting it made no sense. And I guess 36 years later, maybe it's not fair to compare it to the first one, but hey, I'm not the one who put Top Gun in the fucking title, OK?
The first one you'd watch and you wouldn't believe a minute of it. So much of it makes no sense. Why is he driving his motorcycle with no helmet on the flight line? How is this base arranged in any way where you have to walk through public hallways and get into an elevator with just a towel on to get... anywhere? The answers to the questions don't matter. You just finish it kind of laughing and shaking your head. It's itself. The planes are very zoomy and Val Kilmer is hot as all get-out and that's about all you remember. The stakes, in the end, are only life and death.
The sequel wants to teach us some stuff about parents and children, and wisdom vs. impetuousness and trauma and grief and what ghosts look like when they're shaped like Anthony Edwards and not really there. And Val Kilmer is back as both a deus ex machina and a reminder of the ticking clock that hangs over everyone and everything, even Tom Cruise, eventually. It's fine for what it is: a conventional thing with a conventional resolution. Tony Scott has been dead for a while now.
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*We've already established whom the actual protagonist was. In the same vein, the enemy playing the long game here is gravity.
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