Reaction Shots: The Last Aviation Show
The meaning of Top Gun Maverick, plus the Noah Berlatsky Award for Terrible Take.
Review - Top Gun: Maverick
Top Gun repels and fascinates me. For one, it launched the persona of Tom Cruise. He already had hints of his cocksure and smug demeanour when he came on in Risky Business, but playing Peter ‘Maverick’ Mitchel in Top Gun, the hotshot pilot who breaks all the conventions of the Navy would be the role of a lifetime. Top Gun made him the movie star that he is now, and it is a product of the sunny American optimism that, for better or worst, defined the Reagan era. If you have to ask anyone to name a song from the 80s, Danger Zone or Take My Breath Away would probably be the first thing that comes to mind. But the movie, as a whole, is really dull. The pilot sequences are dull, the dialogue is very corny, and many of the characters are underdeveloped. But it proved to be a bonanza. If capitalism represented the science of chemistry, then this movie would be powerful combustion for Hollywood.
That is just the beginning of a journey, and with Maverick, it all hinges on the charisma of Tom Cruise. 36 years after that came out, Cruise felt like the most powerful person in the world. He’s the invincible, versatile manlet who commands the screen through his running and pulling off his own stunts. To see him on the edge of self-control always made him watchable. Whether he is performatively quitting his lucrative sports agent job in Jerry Macguire, or turning into a Terminator-like villain in Collateral, there’s an intensity that moviegoers will attach himself to. Even the bizarre interviews with Oprah (and Australia’s very own Peter Overton) have that quality, which distinguishes his work ethic from other stars of his kind. Still, looking back to those events, it looks like a dent in his career, as he proceeded with the Mission Impossible franchise as his main arsenal.
I say that these were blips because they weren’t as disruptive as what’s to come after. As Cruise has gotten more disciplined in his chops after Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, his lustre as a movie star declined. An example of this is Edge of Tomorrow, which got a very positive reception but underperformed at the box office, to the point where it changed its name to Live. Die. Repeat. Mission Impossible was a franchise that starred Tom Cruise that has steadily remained his most successful offering, but who is the main draw? The name of the franchise or the actor.
Hence Top Gun Maverick is, as Armond White correctly puts it, a test for Tom Cruise. Although it would pass the basic test as a nostalgia hub for Top Gun, Maverick lives off a property that doesn’t have a strong following and the idea for Cruise to resurrect it for modern audiences feels odd. The film was finished prior to COVID-19, and its release dates have repeatedly been delayed until now. Because of this, Maverick was contended to switch to streaming services instead, but Cruise has said it was not a choice he would have taken on because it was never designed for the platform.
The social lens also adds another question mark, but from another perspective. If Top Gun was a nod to the cultural doctrines of Cold War America, then Maverick was released in the midst of America’s polarized politics, much of which derives from the successor ideology, as coined by Wesley Yang. There has been a deep reluctance among Americans to talk about the military, with its series of massive foreign losses (from the Iraq War to Afghanistan), and the possibility that it’s corrupt to the core being entertained by conservatives who are usually supportive of the institutions. There is an idea that with the US Defence entertaining DEI policies and identity politics, conservatives cannot think they can be able to win another conflict. Maverick, having seen its Chinese financier Tencent Pictures removed from production, has refrained from expressing any political stance. The closest it gets to taking one is for a team of six graduate pilots, led by Maverick to take on a top-secret mission to destroy a uranium reserve in an enemy nation, which is never defined.
A franchise would typically reboot itself with a new cast of characters who will not just take the baton of its original heroes, but transform it because they believe that their foundations were inherently flawed. Maverick remains focused on Tom Cruise, and how it rests on the notion that the only person who could carry the mantle is himself. You would think it would be passed on to Bradley ‘Rooster’ Bradshaw, the son of Maverick’s best friend ’Goose’, who died during a training mission. You won’t be surprised by how their tensions are reconciled, but it adds to the aging dimension that underlies the movie in a larger way. One can say that even the thankless roles add to that factor. Jennifer Connelly’s Penny, a single mother and bar owner who rekindles with Maverick and Jon Hamm, stuck in “that’s what the money is for” face as an admiral frustrated with his antics, all bring a likeable human quality and urgency to the hero’s own mortality. It reaches a peak when Maverick meets with Iceman, now a Commander and is played by Val Kilmer. Kilmer, who lost his voice because of throat cancer, communicates with Maverick with such gravitas, since Iceman has evolved from being his friendly rival to a leader with deeper humility.
Top Gun Maverick is one of the best blockbusters I’ve seen in quite a while, and it should be seen on the biggest screen, but I took the step further to watch it in 4DX and every feeling captured on celluloid is transferred into vibrating seats. The action sequences are meant to be realistic and they soar in a way that outperformed the first movie’s stiff dogfights. That it will have you on the edge of your seat. Top Gun Maverick is unsubtle about being a legacy-quel and repeats Top Gun’s storytelling aspects from beginning to end, and its motley crew of young guns are millennial clones of its predecessors, with Hangman being Iceman 2.0. But as Maverick said in his first order back, this is to manage expectations. And, in one manner or another, it went above and beyond.
Preview: Who Did Ray Liotta Play?
For premium subscribers, I wrote an obituary on Ray Liotta, and how the one character he is famous for made him a more complex persona:
I’m in a Facebook group that’s mainly for memes related to Martin Scorsese. A recurring joke is Ray Liotta being neglected by Martin Scorsese, while he relies on his frequent collaborators like Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Leonardo Dicaprio. Liotta said that he would love to work with Scorsese again, but it never happened. There’s a tragic undertone in his comments, especially as he suddenly passed away last week, while shooting another movie. I remember on Twitter joked about him playing an divorce attorney in A Marriage Story and his performance sounds like him letting steam out for not being cast in The Irishman, which was released in the same year.
Ray Liotta is not the greatest actor out there, but he’s a legend. He has played restrained characters before, but even then, there’s an underlying goat-like grit that made Liotta so recognizable.
You Must Watch This: Don’s Party (1975)
Don’s Party is an exquisite entry into Australia’s film canon that is reliably genre-fluid. Based on the 1971 play, it centres on a house party held during the election night of 1969, run by the titular schoolteacher Don and his wife Kath, who are both Labor voters. But as the re-election of then Prime Minister John Gorton becomes eminent, the gathering is just getting warmer, as two of the leader’s supporters come into their house. This meant that as the celebrations begin to drown, a lot of the characters do inappropriate things to each other.
Don’s Party is directed by Bruce Beresford, one of Australia’s most reliable directors who also happens to be a rabble-rouser. The machismo emitted by many of the characters (which one of the actors has complained about) is a path to its brutality. What looks like a party movie is a pipeline into a political drama, where you don’t see the operations in Canberra happening. Just the feeling that change is finally ready, as pushed by the sexual revolution that brought the concept of free love into the scene. It’s an emotion that can be readily felt today, but it is more importantly a time capsule of the Baby Boomers shaping that change. Change is felt, but it’s not going to happen now, which is the reality that Don and his friends must bear and would cost them their friends.
Ironically enough, John Gorton had a cameo in this film, which is more or less a pat on the back for getting his government to financially back the film industry. Apparently, Ozploitation wouldn’t have been possible without him. Does it enhance the artificiality of the middle-class voter or undercut it? Whatever it is, it brings a glistening insight into Australian democracy, and it aged much like the cocktail being made.
ICYMI:
I wrote in Quillette about Australia’s Federal Election and how its centre-right Liberal Party experienced its biggest electoral loss.To summarize here's why:
Climate change was a big deal in some of their electorates, which leaned towards high wealth and action on Net Zero, and many of them lost to a bunch of independents that is bankrolled by 'light money’ (you know, the opposite of the Koch bros).
Some of the Liberals' most conservative MPs left the Party for the minor ones (which is described in the excerpt) and lost!
Each leader became politically expedient to whatever is trendy and spent so much over the moon.
The Noah Berlatsky Award for Terrible Takes
