Yesterday my wife and a friend went to the AMC in Marina Del Rey to watch an afternoon matinee of Top Gun/Maverick. Wow is there a lot of explosive testosterone in this movie! I needed to pop a couple estrogen pills outside in the lobby when it was all over.
Sitting through the bombast action sequences of this melodrama, with its “rah rah let’s go kill cause we’re the best damn fighter pilots America has to offer” made me wonder how the international audiences that see this movie must view us Americans. That’s a rhetorical question. I don’t care for these jingoist types of stories, but I’m sure I’m in the minority.
As a director I noticed some things, but first the writing. It wasn’t bad, there were some meaningful, if false emotional moments and some good twists that took you by surprise. But of course there were also on-the-nose expositional dialogue lines. Performances of the lead actors were fairly good.
However there were some holes in the story. The first sequence involves Maverick stealing a multi-billion dollar plane so he can assuage his ego and attempt to hit mach-10 in it. He’s warned not to go over mach-10 but of course, Maverick doesn’t listen to anything but himself in that big head of his so he over-cranks the speed and destroys the, need I say it again, multi-billion dollar aircraft, and suspending any reality, survives a mach-10 plus punch-out and parachute landing. And here’s the kicker - nothing bad happens to him. No court martial, no jail, not even a swift kick in the pants.
As for its directing, their were exciting moments of flying, supposedly filmed without any CGI by all accounts. And it looked it. But we kept seeing the same angles over and over again of pilots faces in the cockpit. As a pilot myself and a filmmaker, the ones that were rarely filmed which I missed, were shots from behind the aircraft and from the wings which would have helped give context to the action from the viewpoint of the pilots in the cockpit.
Another thing that was bothersome were the big, giant, colossal closeups of Tom that were just too damn close. One of the first things I learned in film school was never to film a close up so tight that it looks like a decapitated head on a shelf. Show a little neck under the chin and perhaps a little space above the head unless you really need to be tighter, then cut a little off of the head but always show the neck! But I imagine the ego of the star demanded this tight composition.
I’ve always had a crush on Jennifer Connelly and she looked mighty fine in this picture. Tom was a lucky man to kiss her at the end of the movie as they leaned against her silver Porsche and then flew away in every aviators wet dream in his WWII P-51 fighter.
The friend we went to see this movie is an attractive woman, slight in stature, waif like, who does yoga and is a writer about sensitive topics women would want to read. I kept thinking as I sat through the Macho, Macho Man moments in this story, with men’s egos so large you could power a small country with them, that she must be squirming in her seat. After I swallowed those estrogen pills, I learned she liked it because her dad was an F-16 pilot in the Air Force. She grew up in Texas and was quite familiar with this type of overblown ego. That surprised me. Never judge a book by it’s cover!
And lastly, I called my little brother (now in his thirties) who works on F-18s the day after we saw the film. To my surprise all of the aircraft footage was shot on his ship - the Theodore Roosevelt - and he was part of the scene. He had a long talk with the director who picked his brain about the plane and what his duty board the ship entailed. It’s a small world!