I Loved "Top Gun: Maverick" But I Did Have One Problem With It
People will say I am taking this movie too seriously.
Top Gun: Maverick has a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It got a very rare A+ CinemaScore. It is on track to blow away opening weekend expectations with $150M.
Maverick is the type of movie that was designed for me. It is a fun, big, well-made, sequel to a fun, big, well-made 80s film I have watched over 100 times. I have been one of the people who was continually upset and disappointed that it was getting postponed again and again over the last 3 years.
The reports of early screenings being greeted with a rapturous response had me so excited that I seriously considered driving 100 miles to see it in Imax at an advanced Tuesday screening rather than wait until Thursday to see it on a normal screen. (I did not actually do this because gas prices you may know, are insane.) But I did go see it on Thursday.
It is really enjoyable! It’s a very fun film! It has a great cast and great flying scenes. Tom Cruise is as Tom Cruise as ever, and if you’re a Tom Cruise fan like myself, that’s heaven.
But considering all the love this movie has gotten, I feel the need to point out that it is an amazingly stupid film.
It’s great! You should see it! If you liked the first one, you should see it! If you like Tom Cruise, you should see it!
But it is so dumb lol.
The general theme of the movie is that Tom Cruise (fighter pilots) is old and movies (the military) now use CGI (drones) and Tom Cruise’s way of doing movies (humans piloting jets and doing bombing runs) is a dinosaur going extinct. The movie is an argument that there is still a place for Tom Cruise and ol’ fashion movie making. And it succeeds! The movie is a blast!
But the movie is nominally supposed to be an argument that fighter pilots and ol’ fashion airplane warfare is still necessary to accomplishing our strategic military goals. And it doesn’t at all make that case!
Look, I get I am taking this movie too seriously, but that’s my choice.
In the first Top Gun, there really isn’t a “mission.” There are the opening and closing dogfights with enemy Migs but they just happen out of the blue for no real reason. The rest of the movie is about people at a training course. Their mission is to train and become the best.
In this movie, there is a real mission that is vital to the national security interests of the United States. And Tom Cruise and his buddies need to do it.
So maybe 8 minutes into the movie, there is a scene where Tom Cruise is briefed on the mission of the film. An evil country has a nuclear lab set up at the base of a mountain and they need to destroy it before it becomes operational. This will require US Naval Aviators to do some insane flying and insane bombing. Should they succeed, they will also then need to survive dogfights with this evil country’s “fifth generation fighters.”
In real life, the US has fifth-generation fighters. The F-22 and the F-35. The F-22 is not used by the Navy and Top Gun is about the Navy so they don’t mention it. The F-35 is flown by the Navy but is crewed by a single pilot. It doesn’t have a second seat. For movie making purposes, the plane they use has to have two seats so one real naval aviator can fly the plane and Tom Cruise can sit in the back and pretend to fly it.
So in Maverick they say some nonsense about how the F-35 wouldn’t work because of radar jamming or something. That means our boys will have to use a fourth-generation plane: the F-18 Super Hornet.
The mission has three parts.
Fly under 100 ft altitude through a canyon incredibly fast
Bomb the lab twice, (so difficult is this shot that it is referred to as “the two miracles”
Pull up, stay conscious through 10Gs, and then somehow survive dogfights with the enemy’s superior planes.
Tom Cruise is to teach a bunch of younger pilots how to do the mission.
He has three weeks.
At no point in the three weeks do any of them come close to succeeding at any part of this. They fail at flying in the canyon, bombing the lab, and escaping without getting killed.
This is a mission of national importance! You have to imagine at this point some people in Washington might be looking for other ways of destroying this lab. Because the Secretary of Defense must have told the President that not only are the odds of this mission long, but that it is virtually guaranteed to fail. “Mr President, if we really need to destroy this lab, we’re going to have to consider other options, because using the naval aviators to do this just is almost certainly going to fail”). But of course there are no scenes in this movie set in Washington. This is a Top Gun problem.
Since there is no reason to believe that any of these people can accomplish this mission, the admiral in charge fires Tom Cruise and decides that the pilots will instead bomb the lab in such a way that makes it a suicide mission. The odds of destroying the lab go up, but they’ll almost certainly get killed. (“These pilots know the risks,” Admiral Jon Hamm shouts.)
Tom Cruise then steals a plane and does the training course and succeeds, proving once and for all that his version of the mission is theoretically possible. He is then unfired and made Team Leader, in a move Jon Hamm says might “cost me my career.” (Why? Why would letting the one person who could possibly accomplish the mission attempt the mission get Jon Hamm in trouble?)
But it’s not just one plane doing this. It’s four. So three of the planes going on this mission are crewed by people who have never come close to giving us any reason to believe they’ll accomplish the mission.
This is a movie so obviously the mission succeeds but the whole film up to that point is about how the mission can’t succeed. It is an impossible mission. There is no reason in the film itself to believe that the other three team members can survive this canyon and bomb this target and pull up at 10Gs.
If anyone is capable of leading a team to success on an impossible mission it is Mission Impossible star Tom Cruise. But in Mission: Impossible the impossible missions that Tom Cruise is forced to do are insane comic book impossible missions where he faces insane preposterous situations. He is the only person who can handle situations like that and he does them regularly. If Tom Cruise doesn’t exist in the Mission Impossible films, then the villains win over and over again. They truly are elaborate insane missions and Tom Cruise is the only person with the bonafides to accomplish them.
But in Maverick, the mission is only impossible if it has to be accomplished by Tom Cruise and his band of naval aviators.
Remember the scene I mentioned 8 minutes in where they describe the mission and why it has to be done in such a way? It lasts maybe 25 seconds. Do not blink! Do not miss it! They will explain the impossible mission many times over the next two hours, but they will never again explain why this is the only way to destroy this nuclear lab. I unfortunately did blink and so spent the whole movie being like “why don’t they just shoot the lab with missiles or smart bombs?”
I cannot find anyone on reddit explaining why they can’t just use missiles. There is no obvious reason why they can’t use missiles. The target has a bunch of anti-aircraft defenses (which is why the planes need to fly their so low) and I can imagine that maybe what is said during the part of that scene I missed is that the missiles would get shot down. But just send more missiles then? Send 50. Send 100. Send 1000. We’re the United States of America. I bet we have lots of missiles. Lots of bombs too! And lots of drones! If it’s really important enough, send thousands of them all! We just need one to get through so we can destroy this nuclear lab before it becomes operational. It seems like the Top Gun pilots are simply the wrong group of people to ask to destroy it.
It’s like asking Top Gun to destroy an underwater city. It would probably be easier if you asked one of the submarines to do that.
It would be ridiculous if in Mission Impossible, Tom Cruise and the Impossible Mission Force were tasked with a mission that was only impossible for them. For instance, no one on the Impossible Mission Force is a lawyer. If they were tasked with suing someone, they would have to wear masks and pretend to be lawyers and do all these crazy things. But if you just asked a lawyer to do it instead of them, it would be pretty easy. They aren’t doctors. To perform heart surgery, the Impossible Mission Force would have to wear a bunch of masks and hack into the surgical database and explain step by step over an earpiece how to do heart surgery. But if you just asked a heart surgeon to do it, it would be a Tuesday.
Top Gun Maverick is a super fun and great film, but you should really pay attention to that one quick scene where they explain why Tom Cruise is doing this mission at all or else you’ll spend the whole movie wondering “why don’t you just bomb it? why don’t you just bomb it?”
Do you know why they can’t just bomb it? Have you seen it? Please tell me.
If you use the words "well made" to describe either of these films, you must use a different dictionary than I do. Perhaps the fact I know quite a bit about the topic, having known a lot of fighter pilots over the decades and written about them, as well as knowing enough about airplanes to know that Mach-10 at an altitude under 100 miles is physically impossible, and an ejection in a normal seat above 600 mph is Fatal. Every. Time. (and at that speed would end you in a hospital for months to recover the damage to your body) means I will never have "the willing suspension of disbelief," but quite frankly - anyone who likes this is too fucking stupid to know that the pointed end goes in front.
And the Trumpian politics (all scientologists are far right scum) drip from the story. Who is the unnamed "Enemy"? Every bad person that makes white male morons uncomfortable. In this case most likely Iran, so the same political crap from the first one got recycled here.
I had to go see the first one because at the time my agent was threatening me with a meeting with Tony Scott about doing some writing. I walked out somewhere around the end of Act Two, found a pay phone and called my agent and asked him to please not waste my time or Mr. Scott's on a futile enterprise.
Thanks to your review and Sonny Bunch's, I can go to sleep tonight secure in the knowledge I don't need to waste money and time I'll never get back on this.
Crap like this is exactly what Scorsese had in mind when he wrote last fall about "international audio-visual entertainment" having replaced actual movies.
Alex Cox described the first film as a "wanking piece of tin-pot fascism." Sounds like the sequel wanks even harder