Day: June 21, 2022

REVIEW: Top Gun: Maverick [2022]

Jared Mobarak

It’s time to let go. Director Joseph Kosinski pays homage to the late Tony Scott by opening his thirty-plus-years-in-the-making sequel Top Gun: Maverick with the exact same music cues, similarly propulsive aircraft carrier b-roll, and text-based intro (adding “and women” to “the handful of men”) as Top Gun. Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” kicks in to whisk us back to the 1980s if only for a couple minutes before entering an aging Navy garage with Captain Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell (Tom Cruise). His dogfighting days over the Indian Ocean are over. After…

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REVIEW: Top Gun [1986]

Jared Mobarak

Your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash. There’s no arguing that Top Gun isn’t a pro-military piece of glossy propaganda. Between Matthew Modine declining the lead role because it would go against his politics to Tom Cruise admitting four years later that a sequel would be in poor taste considering its sanitized view on war to the Navy literally having script approval to change plot points to better suit their recruitment needs, everything about it screams jingoistic idealism. That it would eventually be preserved in the National Film…

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