REVIEW: Top Gun: Maverick [2022]

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: Only the Brave [2017]

Decide what you live for and what you can live without. Interagency Hotshot Crews are twenty person teams of Type 1 firefighters that exceed all experience, training, and fitness requirements of that designation. Originated in the 1940s to combat wildfires on a national level, these groups move all over the country to suppress flames and save cities in need. They’re to firefighters what Navy SEALs are to the military. You call them to get the big jobs done and as such are formed for that specific purpose on a federal…

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REVIEW: Oblivion [2013]

“We’ll come back when it’s over” Originally planned as a graphic novel, Joseph Kosinski‘s Oblivion wouldn’t have stayed solely on the page for long. It’s science fiction romance decades after the Earth is ravaged by nuclear war and alien invasion would have whet any studio’s appetite with or without the director’s work on TRON: Legacy—itself a mixed bag many consider a failure. Disney tooted his horn for awhile leading up to that highly-anticipated sequel, even going as far as outbidding multiple suitors for the rights to his and Arvid Nelson‘s…

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REVIEW: TRON: Legacy [2010]

“Like bio-digital jazz, man” It’s twenty years later and I’m still not quite sure how anyone would think a big budget blockbuster taking place inside a computer mainframe could feasibly be seen as profitable, yet Disney has done it once more. 1982 saw TRON unleashed upon the world with an aesthetic way ahead of its time and confounding language for anyone not a computer programmer. Somehow it gained a huge cult following and the studio held tight, always rumoring a sequel, until they could blow audience minds again. TRON: Legacy…

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