Dead poets society stream with sound movie#
And if it’s an action movie you want, it is what you get. It’s one that’s heavy on spectacle, big on action. In the opening titles, you see the Bruckheimer/Simpson logo, and if you’re familiar with it, then you know you’re getting set up for a very specific kind of movie experience. If I’m talking about this movie as if it’s paint-by-numbers, that’s because it is. When you consider how much Kilmer has had to deal with in recent years, then there’s an added impact, too. Val Kilmer also makes a short, but very emotional, appearance here. I have to say that it’s a credit to Connelly that she manages to put weight to the role, conveying the past relationship with Maverick that is mentioned and never actually shown.Īnd as is inevitable in a movie like this, we need a principal/dean/administrator of some sort to yell at Maverick when he isn’t following the rules.
Throw in an annoying alpha male dude, a nerdy guy, and a few other people to sit in seats while you’re given lectures and montages, enough to make for a beach sports scene.Īlongside the young ones is a romantic storyline featuring Jennifer Connelly as Penny, a character named in the first film. It’s not father and son issues, but it might as well be. He has the same mustache and Hawaiian shirts, but bears a grudge against Maverick, which sets up the main narrative drama. This new batch is led by Miles Teller’s Rooster, who is the son of Anthony Edwards’ Goose. The young pilots are a fair mix, appropriately diverse enough for the times, but still at a level that won’t freak out people who are afraid of diversity (though it could have definitely used more women). And the only man who can train a new batch of pilots is Tom Cruise’s Maverick. The US military needs to destroy the site before then. There’s a ticking clock, which is when the aforementioned rogue state gets a nuclear site operational. It has a much tighter form than the first film. Story-wise, well, it’s pretty much School of Rock/Dead Poets Society/(Insert title of movie with inspiring non-conformist teacher) but with fighter pilots.
Once I checked my politics at the door, I was ready to enjoy the movie. If you can accept this as a military fantasy, where the “bad guy” targets are just sort of randos who help to advance the story, and that a lot of this inhabits an almost video game-like framework, then you can have a lot of fun here.
I actually don’t fault Maverick for this specific evasion. Instead, we follow these American pilots who are going to make the world safe for all of us. We are given no sense of their geography or anything like that. And rather than reflect anything in the real world, this movie decides to have as its Big Bad an unnamed rogue state that has access to nuclear materials. This amid all of the problematic behavior of the US, even if you were just looking at what has happened in, say, Afghanistan and Ukraine. Maverick returns to that and I waffle between calling it aggressively apolitical (because it really manages to evade the Right/Left divide the US confronts now) to in your face political commercial for the US military. When the original film was released, it was part of an innovative collaboration with the US Navy to basically build a piece of propaganda with Hollywood, glamorizing the military and serving as a way to show American exceptionalism. In the same way that its sensibilities are rooted in the ’80s, so goes its politics. Now a big thing to get out of the way is the world that Top Gun occupies.
It makes the right choices in basically taking an ’80s movie aesthetic, updating and improving things to make it feel sleek and modern, and giving audiences a well-calibrated blockbuster. Maverick understands this and doesn’t try to change what worked. Memorable things from it inhabit the imagination in a way that more well-crafted movies don’t. And I think that’s an important point here: Top Gun was a good solid action flick that had a cultural moment. Thinking of the original, it feels almost more of a cultural milestone than important film. But if you responded to the news of another Top Gun movie with a “sure, why not,” then this movie won’t disappoint. It’s not wrong to wonder why, after over three decades since the original film, there would be any need to revisit and add onto the Top Gun narrative. The cynical way to look at Top Gun: Maverick is to see a studio trying to revive a well-known property.
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