Cruise Control

 Full disclosure: I paid to see Top Gun: Maverick. I bought tickets for my family with whom I sat. My son was there to scratch the itch he has for things that go fast. Like jet fighters. I was there to close a circle that was opened back in 1986. It was the most requested VHS tape at the video store I worked at during college. My wife was there to show what a good sport she could be. 

When the lights came up, the three of us shared a moment that suggested what good sports we had all been. We all felt a bit sheepish as we meandered toward the exit. It took us a while before we were able to begin to sum up our feelings. On the drive home, as is often our habit, we tried to tease out where things had gone so wrong. Maybe it was the extra two years of anticipation, having been locked away in the summer blockbuster warehouse while the world adjusted to COVID-19. Perhaps we had simply missed the point. Asking questions of a movie that features Tom Cruise as a naval aviator who has managed to remain a captain over the course of a thirty-five year career ignores the reason for the movie's existence in the first place. It brought me back to my son's ragged insistence that any giant robot movie worth its salt needs to deliver solely on that bottom line: giant robots. Any deviation from this formula for "characters" or "plot" shall be deemed unnecessary and only gets in the way of giant robots fighting. 

The makers of Top Gun: Maverick certainly delivered on their bottom line: jet fighters. And with every jump cut to Tom Cruise sitting in the cockpit makes it that much more compelling. "Hey, Tom Cruise is pulling five Gs!" "Wow, Tom Cruise is going Mach whatever!" And now I must give credit to Letterboxd reviewer Brett for pointing out what should have been obvious to anyone watching: "Hey, Tom Cruise is about to start World War III!" That is, in a nutshell, the plot of Maverick. Whereas the original focused primarily on the challenge of becoming "the best of the best," and operating as a solid piece of recruiting propaganda, the sequel is about blowing up an Iranian nuclear facility. With video game simplicity, the mission is laid out for the hot shot pilots as impossible, unless you happen to be as good as Maverick. The fact that it resembles the attack on the Death Star in another fantasy movie only exacerbates the surreality. Like some sort of airborne Ocean's Eleven, when our boys get away with it, they fly back to their carrier without a thought about being blown out of the water in retaliation. 

All of which puts a fine point on Hollywood's insistence that good guys with guns can fix just about any problem. And we will gladly pay of the chance to watch it happen. Suddenly those giant robots seem so much more relatable. Strap Tom Cruise into one of those babies and put Vin Diesel in the other one with machine guns and cruise missiles and all manner of things that go boom and you'll have us lined up around the block. Who wants to see a movie about a guy who spends his days saving lives?