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Watching/reading catchup: Top Gun
Jul. 2nd, 2023 12:24 amCatching up on some things I watched/read earlier this year and never posted about: Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick! This was probably back in March or April.
(tl;dr - I really liked them.)
So it turned out that both Orion and I, in spite of growing up in the 80s, had never seen the original Top Gun. I think we were exactly the wrong age - we were too young for R-rated movies when it came out, and it didn't really fit the politics of either of our parents, so while I'm sure our dads probably watched it once, it wasn't a movie we were likely to see in our house on TV. And then once we were old enough that we were picking our own movies, the cultural gestalt of the early-to-mid 90s in our friends group was things like Evil Dead and Full Metal Jacket, so an optimistically gung-ho military movie from the mid-80s was exactly the kind of earnest patriotism that we wouldn't have been interested in.
But as it turns out, watching both movies back to back, I was genuinely surprised how much I enjoyed them! The original Top Gun is actually kind of an "underdog sports team" movie, without really having an overt bad guy (Orion, when I said this out loud while we were watching the movie: It's the Russians. The Russians are the bad guys), and even the character who is essentially playing the role of the movie's Jock Bully is actually a genuinely likable guy who makes good points. (I came out of it seeing why people ship Iceman/Maverick, for sure.) The action scenes have aged really well. I would like to say that the music is just the right amount of nostalgia distance to sound good, but let's be real, I've always loved pop/rock soundtracks in movies, and it's interesting and also delightful for me how this was a big thing in the 80s and then went totally out for a while and came back in the 2010s.
So yeah, I liked this a lot, and then watching the sequel the next day was a trip. Honestly, I *really* liked how the sequel captures the Feel of being older and watching the world you knew and your own youth slip away, watching The Youth come up behind you, and dealing with your own complex feelings about it all. I really loved the romance in this one; it was really nicely done, and I liked how she had her own life and past, too, and her own things she was good at that weren't Maverick things, but were compatible enough with Maverick things that you could see them being happy together. I loved finding out that Tom Cruise is really flying his own plane in the small-plane sequence, and the fighter jet shots were shot in real fighter jets that the actors had to work up to flying in. (Reading about this was actually the first time I understood that you can train yourself out of motion sickness, and the actors did in fact go through this training so they could film the scenes. Here's one of the articles on it - non-graphic mention of bodily fluids.)
This is what I loved best, though:
( Spoilers for Top Gun: Maverick )
(tl;dr - I really liked them.)
So it turned out that both Orion and I, in spite of growing up in the 80s, had never seen the original Top Gun. I think we were exactly the wrong age - we were too young for R-rated movies when it came out, and it didn't really fit the politics of either of our parents, so while I'm sure our dads probably watched it once, it wasn't a movie we were likely to see in our house on TV. And then once we were old enough that we were picking our own movies, the cultural gestalt of the early-to-mid 90s in our friends group was things like Evil Dead and Full Metal Jacket, so an optimistically gung-ho military movie from the mid-80s was exactly the kind of earnest patriotism that we wouldn't have been interested in.
But as it turns out, watching both movies back to back, I was genuinely surprised how much I enjoyed them! The original Top Gun is actually kind of an "underdog sports team" movie, without really having an overt bad guy (Orion, when I said this out loud while we were watching the movie: It's the Russians. The Russians are the bad guys), and even the character who is essentially playing the role of the movie's Jock Bully is actually a genuinely likable guy who makes good points. (I came out of it seeing why people ship Iceman/Maverick, for sure.) The action scenes have aged really well. I would like to say that the music is just the right amount of nostalgia distance to sound good, but let's be real, I've always loved pop/rock soundtracks in movies, and it's interesting and also delightful for me how this was a big thing in the 80s and then went totally out for a while and came back in the 2010s.
So yeah, I liked this a lot, and then watching the sequel the next day was a trip. Honestly, I *really* liked how the sequel captures the Feel of being older and watching the world you knew and your own youth slip away, watching The Youth come up behind you, and dealing with your own complex feelings about it all. I really loved the romance in this one; it was really nicely done, and I liked how she had her own life and past, too, and her own things she was good at that weren't Maverick things, but were compatible enough with Maverick things that you could see them being happy together. I loved finding out that Tom Cruise is really flying his own plane in the small-plane sequence, and the fighter jet shots were shot in real fighter jets that the actors had to work up to flying in. (Reading about this was actually the first time I understood that you can train yourself out of motion sickness, and the actors did in fact go through this training so they could film the scenes. Here's one of the articles on it - non-graphic mention of bodily fluids.)
This is what I loved best, though:
( Spoilers for Top Gun: Maverick )