Top Gun: Maverick

[sunofdarkchild]

I saw it relatively late and it is the best movie of the year so far in my opinion.

I was never a big fan of the original Top Gun. It's fine for an 80s action flick but I was rooting against Maverick the whole time. This absolutely blows the original out of the water. Maverick is so much more likeable as a character in the sequel, there's real emotion to the story, and the action scenes are as good as it gets.

Maverick's arc reminds me somewhat of Captain Kirk's arc in Wrath of Khan. The aging war hero who is made to question if he still has anything to give and faces a life of irrelevancy if he's pushed out of the one military job he excels at, while dealing with the loss of a close friend and their own mortality.

In real life they should have just used the F-35s. The F-35 has no need for GPS in targeting and is just as capable of using laser-targeting as any other plane. The bombs they carry generally don't use GPS at all. They invented a weakness that the real plane doesn't have. They should also have sent a much larger strike force with many more planes at least providing support. But this is all excusable because the movie wouldn't work if real-world military logic applied. The F-35 can't be used for movies the way older planes can since they are single seaters, so the in-cockpit shots of them actually flying would be impossible. The F-35 is also too overpowered for tense cinema. The climax wouldn't be as memorable if it was as easy as it would be in real life if they used a dozen or more F-35s and F-22s with a large number of support craft or the even more realistic option of using a bunch of F-35s to clear out the resistance so a B-52 could drop the necessary bombs.