Friday, July 19, 2019

WWYG Old School Review: Top Gun--Maverick


Let's do this Old School (or as my friend EH said back when WWYG?! was a regularly going concern--"Let's kick it Old Style") and review the trailer for Tom Cruise's new death wish Top Gun: Maverick.

As with all Tom Cruise movie vehicles of the past decade, the persistent storyline of the movie promotion is that he does his own stunts. This has been said about him since the Mission: Impossible 2 days when he was beginning the movie by free climbing some rock face. So, after three seconds of watching a video where people were hyping TG: Maverick, they pointed out that Cruise is piloting these jets himself.

And so that makes you wonder how well he's trained to do this?
And what is the insurance policy on this film like?
And where are these highly technical and very expensive jets coming from that we can just hand some over to Tom Cruise like it's a financial rounding error and nobody is gonna worry about it?

(But please, remind me how we don't have money in this country to properly give asylum seekers adequate food and housing or that we can't really afford to battle climate change. Sure.)

Everything for the all-mighty God of Cinema! Please Tom Cruise, switch to guns and hammer my heart with your nostalgia bullets!

(This isn't really a review as much as a sequence of Twitter posts collected together under a thematic heading.)

But what is there to review? If you've seen Top Gun--and I can only think of four people I personally know who definitively have not--then you've already seen this movie. As far as the trailer goes, all it is doing is reminding us of what Top Gun was back in the Reagan '80s and giving it to us again. In fact, I assume that the world premiere of this movie in 2020 will just happen at the Republican National Convention and that Tom Cruise himself will rappel on stage from the rafters of the Charlotte, North Carolina Spectrum Center to nominate Donald Trump.

Back to the trailer.
Are they saving the dramatic reveal of Meg Ryan? Was Kelly McGillis even approached? Or is Tom waiting to unleash his latest hit on them to gather all of the nostalgia feelings for himself alone? See Hollywood--I know how to manipulate nostalgia as well! I used to say all the same that Tom Cruise was Insane when celebrities died. Yet even though he's increasingly involving himself in dangerous stuff, I don't worry about his safety anymore. The movie is already made. If Tom died during filming we'd know. Unless Hollywood really does own cloning technology so advanced?*

And maybe Hollywood does since it keeps cloning old ideas in new guises?

So I guess I don't know how to feel about this movie. Intellectually I want to reject it and demand new things. But I didn't go see Jupiter Rising did I? And I didn't go see Mortal Engines either did I? So I am for sure part of the problem. And if I am not squarely the demographic that Top Gun: Maverick was made for . . . then just put me on my ice floe right now and push me off into the ocean.

So, go ahead Tom! Inject your 80s nostalgia directly into my cerebellum!

* This is an oblique reference to a very distant early 2000s era Web site called "Damn Hell Ass Kings" that talked about entertainment, TV, and celebrity culture. I spent too long trying to find any evidence of its existence on the Internet and found nothing. I am confident the URL is dead and all of the content has evaporated. It's a shame. It would have worked really well within my theme of nostalgia. But if anyone knows how to find that site, let me know!

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