"Top Gun: Maverick" Hits The Fan Service Jackpot
#178: "Top Gun: Maverick," "Stranger Things," "Toscana," "Cop Land," "Wrath of Man"
Edition 178:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: What does it mean to be an arthouse movie these days, as Alex Garland’s Men takes center stage. For streaming offerings, there’s more Jackass content and a couple of oldies but goodies. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” my favorite movie star is in a big time action movie coming to Netflix.
Top Gun: Maverick
There have been times in the last couple of months, and I guess really since the start of this newsletter almost four years ago, when I complain about movies that don’t seem to know why they exist. “Who is this for?” I ask, often in whiny, overcooked rantings.
But there has maybe never been a movie that has known its purpose for existence more definitively than Top Gun: Maverick, from opening gong and guitar solo over the opening credits to soaring Lady Gaga vocals over the end credits, the latter of which was met in many screenings (including mine) with a standing ovation.
This movie sets its missile lock on maximum audience enjoyment, and succeeds in becoming an almost overwhelming exercise of the pleasure sensors most adult moviegoers haven’t had serviced in years (unless they’ve fallen under the mass psychosis of the Marvel machine).
I’ve heard or read or seen of dozens of people crying at various nostalgic moments throughout the movie, fist pumping during action sequences and standing to applaud when it was over.
It’s really refreshing, in this era of ironic detachment (another of my common complaints), to see a movie that is unashamed to take itself seriously while also being entirely comfortable with audiences not taking it too seriously. Corny? Cheesy? Over the top? Great, send it. Full send it.
These same adults, who prognosticators assumed must be hesitant to return to theaters because of Covid rather than the obvious lack of appealing offerings for their demographic, have showed up to the tune of $200 million domestically and over $330 million worldwide and counting.
The narrative will be easy to write that Tom Cruise “saved” movies, since he just had the biggest opening weekend of his career and paid off Paramount’s trust in holding the movie more than two years since its initial release date. No capes or kryptonite required!
But the truth is that Top Gun: Maverick succeeded by stealing the Marvel playbook. Fan service is the name of the game in the MCU, as in all modern blockbusters, of which this is certainly one. No one would mistake this movie as the artistic vision of any one auteur — every aspect of it feels like it’s been touched, worked over, considered and market-tested by a thousand different people.
In this environment, the primary loyalty is to the core IP. Story logic does not follow real life logic but rather the logic of its own “cinematic universe,” to borrow the term du jour. That’s why the plot of this movie is an almost carbon copy of the original, including a handful of scenes that are literal recreations1. There’s callbacks2, easter eggs3, and feel-good character reintroductions4.
When done well, this stuff is effective in creating the kinds of reaction — tears, screaming, intense fandom — that might be familiar to fans of the MCU.
I guess the reason why I can celebrate some of the same storytelling choices here that I always criticize Marvel for it because, quite simply, it’s a real human story. A hundred times out of a hundred I will take the full weight of blockbuster resources being used on fighter jets and beach bars in San Diego rather than the indecipherable CGI punchfests between gods and alien monsters on some far away planet of Gobbledygook.
Even the obvious appeals to universality, whether it’s the unidentified, amorphous enemy nation or very broad character sketches or the cast diversity5 or the overly tame “sex scene” (if you can even call it that), don’t anger me like they would normally because they don’t reek of commercialism. Nobody is trying to sell action figures or theme park rides here, and this smoothing of all jagged edges allows viewers to turn off their critical brains entirely and surrender themselves to the experience.
And what an experience it is. The action sequences in this movie are some of the most incredible ever filmed, thanks to new technology that allowed director Joseph Kosinski to mount six IMAX quality cameras inside the cockpit of actual fighter jets, and choreograph most of the flying sequences practically from the pilots’ point of view.
Those visuals, combined with pulse-pounding audio effects and music, creates the kind of exhilarating thrill ride that really does remind you why movies in movie theaters can be so special.
Of course, none of this would work without Cruise, who is the sun around which all these planets orbit. He’s more stunt man than actor at this point in his career, but he continues to tell father time — and Ed Harris, in one early scene in which he’s told the world is moving on without him — “not today.” His charisma and ability to shoulder the load of not just a movie but an entire franchise is once again on display.
Around him is the perfect ensemble cast. There’s Miles Teller and Glenn Powell, playing the cocky a-hole young fighter pilots they were born to play, and proving there may be a future to this franchise in a post-Cruise world (which would have to come quite literally when Cruise has left this world). Throw in Harris admirably for a scene or two, Jon Hamm in a thankless part as Stodgy Authority Figure We’re Supposed To Hate No. 2, and Jennifer Connelly in a more thankless part as Romantic Interest No. 2, plus dynamic young faces to fill in the flight crew (Monica Barbaro, Jay Ellis, Lewis Pullman) and you’ve got the kind of cast who people can fall in love with time and time again.
Which is exactly what they will do. People will go back to the theater a second and third time, and rewatch this movie for years to come. Because movies aren’t dead, they simply haven’t serviced us this well in a long time.
Something New
Stranger Things S4 (Netflix): I didn’t necessarily intend for Millie Bobby Brown to become this newsletter’s public enemy No. 1, but I’m not shying away from it either. People have been asking me if I’ve watched these new episodes, knowing everything I said about Enola Holmes. And all I’m going to say is I stand by every word I said then.
Toscana (Netflix): If you don’t use your Netflix account for virtual tourism then you’re doing it wrong. You can travel around the world from your couch, with the help of Anthony Bourdain, Formula 1 or, in this case, a fictional Michellin-starred Danish chef who inherits a villa in Tuscany and goes there to … I don’t know … learn the true meaning of life? I don’t remember because I was too busy ogling the beautiful vistas and even more beautiful food in this movie. And across 90 minutes, that’s all I, or you, really need.
Something Old
Cop Land (1997, HBO Max): Rest in peace at just 68 years old to screen legend Ray Liotta, who may have made a lot of bad movies in his career but is also a big part of some of the most iconic films ever put to celluloid, like Goodfellas and Field of Dreams, and continued to be prolific with his more recent work in Marriage Story and The Many Saints of Newark. All those felt like too obvious suggestions, so I sought out one this week that’s a little more off the beaten path.
Seeing Sylvester Stallone attempt “serious” acting was enough to make me avoid this movie for years, but it’s a sign of the times that Stallone could be a lead actor in a movie that also features Liotta, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Peter Berg, Noah Emmerich (the assistant coach from Miracle!) and Michael Rapaport (the part-time ESPN bloviator).
It’s really everything I love about 90s movies, in that it’s got a really clever premise — a sheriff of a town whose residents are all police officers investigates corruption — played in the most earnest and going-for-it way. That’s the specialty for extremely capable writer/director James Mangold, who would go on to make earnest send-ups like Walk The Line, 3:10 To Yuma, Logan, and Ford v Ferrari. The movie is really good, and not even in an ironic way. Stallone is a bit of a curious figure as a sad sack pushover in the first half of the movie, making his obvious turn into badass hero cop all the more enjoyable. Definitely a big recommend from me.
Something to Stream
Wrath of Man (Amazon Prime): Last Halloween me and my friends dressed up like characters from The Gentlemen, an infinitely quotable Guy Ritchie movie that barely anyone had seen. Very on brand. However, the movie dropped on Netflix last month and spent a fair amount of time in the streamer’s Top 10, so all of a sudden I started getting texts and messages from friends being like “oh I get it now.”
If you’re a fan of Ritchie’s in-your-face-style cockney gangster movies (RocknRolla, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, or the best of the bunch, Snatch), then you’ll want to make sure to catch this entry about a mysterious man (Jason Statham) who joins the police force and very quickly proves to be much more adept than the PD had bargained for. It’s not cockney - regrettably - but amongst the hyper-masculine moviegoing crowd who would love Top Gun it’s a pretty fun streaming movie. I reviewed it in full (favorably!) a year ago.
Trailer Watch: The Menu
As I’ve said before, actors LOVE playing chefs (second only to boxers for role-every-movie-star-must-try-once). This time it’s Ralph Fiennes running a fine dining kitchen, which already sounds awesome, with Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult as customers among a whole host of other recognizable faces.
There’s some kind of cult/crime/thriller element to the movie that isn’t really revealed in the trailer, which I love. And I’m really curious to see what director Mark Mylod can do with the feature format, after directing episodes of big ticket TV shows like “Game of Thrones” and “Succession.” Count me in!
The opening air craft carrier sequence; Maverick on the motorcycle; “Great Balls of Fire” in the bar; the surprise instructor introduction in the hanger classroom etc. etc.
Planes going inverted on top of each other, Maverick buzzing the tower etc.
Jennifer Connelly’s character was first mentioned as the subject of a throwaway joke in the original movie
Val Kilmer’s return as “Iceman,” which was legitimately touching but served no other purpose to the movie than to service the fans (again, not saying this as a bad thing)
Even it felt borderline-token. This movie definitely provides the bare minimum in terms of progressive social standards