“Top Gun: Maverick” was less a tribute to an old, fan favorite than a complete repeat of it. It’s on an Operation Mockingbird level of redundancy with newer, more intense flying scenes and dog fights. It’s hard to “spoil” this movie if you’ve seen the first one. It’s the same damned movie.
If you receive a value from this work, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber for as little as $9 per month. I value you and appreciate your attention to your personal growth through my work.
So, people claim to go to an action movie for the action, but doesn’t the writing have to count for something? Anything?
No… well, then you might actually enjoy this piece of blatant, military propaganda.
I will give away that the film starts with a little video intro starring Billie Jean King, and she is looking great for her age. In fact, I’d like to know who her stylist is because her hair is perfect for a maturing woman. On to the film…
In this “new” rendition, Maverick and his team burned a lot of fuel doing things the wrong way and killed a lot of planes on the tax payer dime. Not new. The main characters are exuberant about higher budgets for military. They are willing to destroy hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment and risk lives to attain bigger budgets for outdated military combat training. It’s almost as if the departments of defense had a hand in writing this movie. The characters mock orders that actually save lives as well as other people’s money (not just the arbitrarily counter intuitive orders followed to the letter in real life). They champion the funding of outdated methods of war as well as planes. As I understood it, in many theaters military recruiters stood in the lobby waiting to lure young people exiting the film into their death cult with a bloated and unrealistic sense of military heroics. I also get the sneaking suspicion the development of the F-14’s for purchase with your tax payer dollars might be making a comeback after watching this film.
Hey, contractors gotta get paid.
Now, the opening scene shows a bobblehead on a desk of what appears to be good old, dishonest Abe: the war tyrant. If you still don’t know this, read Thomas DiLorenzo’s book. Abe bobblehead conveniently nods to himself, just like Lincoln used to IRL. The nod to Abe is not unlike what the public school system, private school system and the text books have been doing for the past 120 years. But who’s counting?
Once the speaking parts begin, it’s all down hill. Maverick opens in a meeting with secret defense agents in a secure hanger, and the characters are all standing around acting like they don’t believe their lines. They are so bad at making them sound authentic, that I keep expecting Kelly McGillis to jump out of a cake and surprise Tom on his nearly 60th birthday. It’s an extraordinarily, awkward scene. I kept asking myself, what’s the punchline here? What gag is about to happen?
(Spoiler alert: there was no cake, it’s just bad lines and terrible acting.)
It gets worse from there.
Ed Harris makes a horribly brief cameo appearance you’ll wish he hadn’t. The script is an exact replica of the original film. They tried to match every scene, scene for scene, punchline for punchline with the first film. It’s an all new cast of characters portraying the old cast of characters. You’re sitting through the whole film quizzing yourself, which character said that in the original?
Please, don’t get me wrong. I loved “Top Gun.” I had it memorized once upon a time. I loved the script way back when. I bought into the pro-military propaganda with zeal. I saw it in theaters a gazillion times before watching it at home another gazillion. In fact, it was the first movie that I ever saw in a theater more than once. Nobody was paying to see the same movie twice until “Top Gun.” It just wasn’t a thing.
But viewers of “Maverick” have been duped into paying for the same movie, albeit with better action but with far worse writing and acting, while being told it’s a sequel, a continuation of the original story. It’s not.
The best two lines in the entire film weren’t even spoken. Val Kilmer shows up for his reprise of Ice Man, thankfully, and he types his responses to Maverick on a machine so he doesn’t have to speak. It is in fact difficult for Kilmer, the man himself, to speak after a life altering battle with throat cancer. Watch his movie, “Val” on Prime for a great overview of his life through his own camera over the years. Anyway, after typing this message for Maverick, IceMan looks deep in Maverick’s eyes and holds the stare. It’s literally the only few seconds of this film I believe are genuine. His compelling message to Maverick is “you gotta let go.” If he means to convince his old friend, Tom to let go of the old “Top Gun” movie narrative, he’s not wrong.
I found myself sitting in the theater, unconsciously nodding in agreement.
Then, we get the shirtless beach volleyball scene, but instead it’s offensive/defensive beach football. At this point-and only this point, I was grinning from ear to ear thinking of how my buddy, Aaron Peterson is getting massive wood over how even more gay this scene is than the original, despite having a chick in it. Just when you thought there was nothing more gay than that original beach volley ball scene set to Kenny Loggins, “Playin’ With Those Boys”…
The big problem with this film is: Maverick. You want to know where he has been, who he has become and how it has changed him only to find out: Maverick has never changed.
He’s almost 60 years old. Even though he’s still in great physical shape, he’s not cut out for this character. Nobody is. His Peter Pan Syndrome at nearly 60 years old is so painfully obvious, it’s disturbing. His romance scenes with his new leading lady, (I won’t spoil who) are not what people want to see. If I go to a movie with a couple of 60ish year old’s falling in love, I truly expect them to be witty, wise and relatable as 60 year old’s. “As Good As It Gets” and “Something’s Gotta Give” come to mind.
Instead, we feel like we are watching a romance believable of what happens between two 20 year old’s who don’t have a heck of a lot of self-respect nor hobbies. They do still like their adventure, but nothing else. I’ll remind you if you haven’t seen it, we are looking at the bodies of cosmetically enhanced 50 something year old’s here. It’s some grotesque “Freaky Friday” shit, but without the resolve of going back to their older, wiser selves in the end. As my kids would say, “it’s cringe.” The reality is that any couple over the age of 35 meeting for the first time are too tired for the drama and high school antics of this on-screen pairing.
But the biggest beef most people have is that “Top Gun” took place prior to 9/11 and the never ending war on terror. Americans are now older and wiser. We just don’t buy into the chest thumping, pro military propaganda anymore- unless we’re talking about the neocons on the left. For them, watching a movie that reminds them of a time before they supported never ending, interventionist wars makes them feel a little hypocritical now.
So, about 3/4 of the way through this film, it dawns on me. There’s no secret uranium reserves, or other chemical weapons for that matter being hidden or moved by anyone in the real world- anyone save the United States. Whatever major (“public” property) uranium reserves exist (many in the US), Hillary Clinton helped to sell to the Russian owned company, Uranium One, in a legally binding contract while she headed the state department in the biggest pay-to-play deal in her career, that we know of.
But so what?
The biggest epiphany for me wasn’t the military waste or the fact that we gave the so called “bad guys” the uranium stash in real life. It’s that presently, there’s a sweet natured, peace advocate by the name of Eva Bartlett, traveling back and forth in person to Donetsk (formerly in Ukraine) to interview some old world, Russian speaking people whose families have held on to land in The Ukraine region for centuries.
These people recently received their own sovereign state (liberated by the “evil” Russian military) so they would no longer be shelled by literal Nazis from Ukraine in the Azov Battalion.
Eva’s over there right now, probably as I live and breathe, interviewing villagers whose homes and gardens are blasted out. She’s risking her life to help people in human rights councils around the globe understand the atrocities happening in the name of “spreading democracy.”
All the while, most of the US is oblivious with whom Russia is at war, much less, whom Ukraine has been bombing out for over a decade. These are little, old ladies with scarves on their heads, like some woman you’d see in a street market in a Fellini film. One old lady that Eva interviewed had just walked to the front of her tiny stone home when the back half was blown apart by Ukrainian forces.
Don’t let the news fool you, the Ukrainians have zero military targets. They’ve been shooting schools, farmers and old ladies for a decade to scare them or genocide them out of a land in which they want complete control and zero ideological opposition.
This is the war this movie was made to recruit for and promote.
It occurs to me that a modern day Maverick in the US military or one thinking of enlisting, sees himself (or herself) a hero rushing to the aid of Ukraine. In reality, all this “defending” Ukraine is from little, old people in their tiny villages. The majority of gung-ho Americans believe they are back in a World War II scenario (which was also not remotely as cut and dry as we’ve been taught) of good triumphing over evil against “the Russians.” In reality, Russian leadership finally had enough of UN and US meddling in their personal affairs. Instead of retaliating against these superpowers, they decided to do something about Russian kids and old people being shelled in their homes every day in their neighboring country.
Do I approve of Russian interference in Ukraine?
I go back and forth. Many of those fighting with Russia are volunteers and small operations set up to fight inside Ukraine ages ago. Then again, many US citizens ran over to volunteer for Ukraine only to discover they were to be used as human shields for literal Nazis. Before you ask me if I am “simping for Russia,” ask yourself how any thinking person supports Americans as human shields for Nazis?
In the middle of this horribly written, high budget piece of cinematic crap, I found myself inconsolably crying real tears for Eva, for the people of Donetsk and the uphill battle they have against western propaganda, and its multimillion dollar, beautifully lit, box office smashing, hit films (even if they are crap do-overs) and the international audiences who unwittingly buy into them.
If you think my tears are ridiculous, imagine signing your life and bodily autonomy away to the military industrial complex after watching this totally derivative film.
Illuminati, anyone?
Should I mention in one of the amazingly shot dog fight scenes, Maverick has 33 shots left in his jet? Lucky number 33. It’s like they are trying to tell us something. Well, I did enjoy the flight scenes. I really did. The rest was a long winded, rip off of the first film and the audience who paid 2022 ticket prices to get duped into seeing it all over again.
As I flipped on Netflix last night, I came across “Hustle” starring Adam Sandler. It has the same theme as “Top Gun: Maverick,” an orphaned boy looking for a father figure. The father figure is portrayed far better by Sandler than Cruise. Sandler is a completely underrated actor, in my humble opinion. The writing is good, and the plot doesn’t feel (despite my friend, Brett McQuigg naming a gazillion movies about sports and how they’ve all been done before) remotely ripped off.
Everyone has a big screen TV now, so my recommendation is to wait until “Top Gun: Maverick” is free on Prime if you want to destroy a good hour or two of your life give or take the flight scenes. In the meanwhile, watch one of the better 5 movies I mentioned in this post for a heck of a lot less money through streaming services, or better yet, read a book!