3/14/2023 0 Comments Death dream![]() This sequence is strikingly beautiful, up in the calm dark of the stratosphere with the curvature of the planet clear as Maverick edges up to become, as Bashir Salahuddin’s character reverently notes, the fastest man on earth. He takes to the air, his speed ticking up decimal point by decimal point until he reaches what was supposed to be the day’s goal of Mach 9, and then keeps going past it. This gives Maverick just enough time for one last flight, and one last attempt to save the program from getting scrapped. Rear Admiral Cain, played by a desiccated Ed Harris, plans to shift the funding over to unmanned aircraft, which he believes are the future, and is coming to shut the program down personally. When Top Gun: Maverick begins, its title character is still flying, having successfully skirted all promotions, and is working as a test pilot for a hypersonic jet that’s on the verge of being discontinued for having not yet reached its promised speed of Mach 10. But the first - the first crash is genuinely weird. After all, Maverick crashes twice in the sequel, the second time during the final act of the film, in a heroic act of self-sacrifice over enemy territory after a series of implausibly acrobatic aerial maneuvers. ![]() But it’s more fun to imagine the film is a death dream, an Incident at Owl Creek Bridge fantasy taking place in the instant before Maverick blinks out of existence high above the Mojave Desert. You can make sense of this unreality simply by considering Top Gun: Maverick as the project and projection of one of the last movie stars, a movie that will contort itself in every way possible to make Cruise more gleamingly dominant than ever before, even as the years tick by for him and for all of us. When he sits down at the piano to sing the same song (“Great Balls of Fire”), he feels less like a new character than a ghost stuck in the grooves of the original film. There’s a hermetic eeriness to the San Diego naval base, which is so unstuck in time that when Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s late friend and RIO Goose (Anthony Edwards), makes his entrance at a bar, it’s in the same shirt and mustache as his dad. The enemy they’re going up against has not just been left unnamed, as they were in the 1986 Top Gun, but deliberately unparsable, with a combination of qualities that can’t be mapped onto any existing nation. The slew of fresh young flyers are tauter-skinned and more diverse and less prone to using unnecessary punctuation in their texts than Maverick, but of course are still nowhere near as skilled. The logic of this scenario - Maverick is, by any account, a terrible member of the military, no matter his talents - is as spongy as everything that follows. There is, as my colleague Bilge Ebiri observed, something haunting and unreal and stubbornly dreamlike about the sun-soaked world of Top Gun: Maverick, which hinges on the unlikely summoning of Cruise’s renegade flyboy Pete “Maverick” Mitchell back to San Diego to prepare a new generation of pilots for a mission so ridiculously difficult that he’s the only one who can conceive of a way of accomplishing it. I am arguing this not as one of those acts of fan theorizing that pops up on Reddit from time to time - you know, that Ferris Bueller is actually a figment of Cameron’s fevered mind, or that Marsellus Wallace’s soul is contained in that suitcase kicking around in Pulp Fiction - but as the only way to really make sense of the movie. Tom Cruise’s character dies at the start of Top Gun: Maverick.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |