Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Anybody see Top Gun Maverick? Biggest movie of the year (so far, it could get dethroned by Avatar or Black Panther). Made over $700m in the US and Canada, and like $1.4b worldwide. I think this is the first weekend it has fallen out of the top 5.
Anyways, I was excited to see it and finally went a couple weeks ago. But it seems like absolute shit to me. Beautifully shot, the flying scenes are great. And yet the story seems bland. The graphics used when they are discussing missions and stuff seemed like some shit out of a Command & Conquer cutscene. A lot of transitions between scenes felt a bit sudden, like something was cut. I've seen celebrities gushing over this film, Quentin Tarantino was fanboying over it. But I honestly think it's one of the worst Tom Cruise movies I've ever seen.
And despite being the biggest movie of the year, I've barely seen a peep about it online (other than it's box office success). Despite seeing it a coupe weeks ago, I never ran into a single spoiler for it. Never saw a single meme. So obviously not a movie that appealed to those who very online. On YouTube I'd been putting every Top Gun video I saw in my Watch Later playlist, to binge after I saw it. And even those videos, going over how great the film was, really had no substance. All the interviews I found with the cast were just the same stories about flying in a jet or meeting Tom Cruise.
The bits James Corden did with Tom Cruise were more satisfying than the actual film.
I'm definitely not a film buff, so maybe I'm missing something. I have seen the original, quite a few times. But something just felt 'off' throughout this film.
It was a very well-executed movie, probably the best action movie (in a platonic sense) since Fury Road, notably another 80s revival. The plot is straightforward and functional, yes, but complex, political plots with twists and turns and grey villains and sociopolitical commentary have been in vogue over the last 20 years. A reaction against that towards simple plots that uses a strong emotional core and characters to hang the action is unsurprising, as is that being tied up in our current nostalgia moment. This is a subset of, but not strictly equivalent to the IP mining that is also going -- Star Wars reboots are part of this nostalgia moment, the Marvel empire is not, while Stranger Things is an (early) part of the former but not the latter. Within these 80s nostalgia plays, much of it has been pretty terrible (Ghostbusters, Star Wars, etc) but a few have been quite good (Maverick, Mad Max, Karate Kid). The lack of a political context or complex villain (the enemy given as minimal detail as possible) is a deliberate choice to not detract from the emotional conflicts in the film and the characters' struggles.
With the success of Maverick, I'd expect to see more minimal, character-centric action movies, and dogfighting films in particular (shown to be very underserved). More scenes where the hero returns victorious to cheering crowds, more nondescript villains.
I think a potentially unremarked-upon aspect of the film I appreciate is the tone it's saturated with -- it's more mature than the original without thinking that mature necessarily means dark, or tortured, or politically intricate. Where the former was testosterone and surface-level id played for face value, there's a world-weariness to the sequel. Maverick's tentatively rekindled relationship with Jennifer Connolly's character plays out the same kind of nostalgia -- real, bittersweet wistfulness nostalgia, not 'remember AT-STs' -- that suffuses the whole film. The characters feel deeply bound by their history in a way many other reboots completely fail to emulate. What cockiness was just a sharp expression of young competition is now just a wry, self-aware habit. Maverick can't be anything else, the only difference is now he knows it.
To be fair to the SW sequels, I feel like The Force Awakens did manage to get this right at one point, with the relationship between Han and Leia. They missed each other, they clearly still love each other ... and they've long since realized that they just can't live with each other, despite having tried their best. We get nostalgia for the cutesy cocky "love-hate relationship" development from the original trilogy, but this time in a new bittersweet realistic light.
Based on the rest of the script I have to wonder if this was an accident, if the writers were just trying to make it (unnecessarily even more) obvious that General Leia is a Strong Woman Who Don't Need No Man, but whether intentionally or not their execution there was excellent.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link