Thinking about today’s Hollywood often means doing it in the gears that move the industry, the box office and the commercial strategies of the big studios at the stroke of a trend and that, despite the fact that they have always been there —after all, we are talking about a business that moves to the rhythm of supply and demand—, they make more noise than ever due to the hyperconnected and information-saturated reality in which we live.
Among them, in addition to the inexhaustible vein of superheroes, endless franchises and shared universes, we find some late sequels turned into little less than nostalgic sweatshops that usually do not offer more than a regression to memories and places that, perhaps due to the effects of the passage of time, we believe to be better than they perhaps were.
In the midst of this panorama, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ rises as one of those very few exceptions that not only dazzles in its condition of a model continuation, but also manages to improve the original. And it is that Joseph Kosinski and his team have unhesitatingly embraced the plot cliché that confronts past and present, turning it almost into a narrative engine that makes what we could describe as take off. the perfect blockbuster.
welcome to the danger zone
The credits sequence of ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, which transports us to the rhythm of Kenny Loggins at the end of the eighties, stands as a declaration of intent and as a small preview of the time paradox what the feature film entails. The music, the montage, the classic color palette teal & orange… all that bombards the stalls for the first few minutes is worthy of the Bruckheimer factory of three decades agobut there is something that doesn’t quite add up.
As its footage progresses, the film, which adopts the foundations of the formula that made half the world fall in love 36 years ago and perfects them to unsuspected limits, progressively reveals itself as a kind of cinematographic time machine that invites us to think of a blockbuster from another era —a sociocultural update apart—, but with an execution at the forefront of the medium.
As expected, in the first aspect of the film where this evolution can be perceived is in its great claim: such spectacular and revolutionary action scenes as were those of ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ in 2015. And it is not every day that the cast of a blockbuster gets on a few jets loaded with cameras to shoot aerial combat scenes without cheating or cardboard.
This display of muscle, photographed by the always lucid Claudio Miranda —responsible for titles such as ‘The Life of PI’, ‘Oblivion’, ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’— and edited by the precise Eddie Hamilton —’Mission: Impossible – Fallout’—, gives away a truly overwhelming collection of set pieces and that, viewed on an IMAX screen with an aspect ratio of 1.90:1, disengage jaws and cause authentic vertigo.
Of course, it is no reason to be surprised that a actioner of 150 million dollars starring Tom Cruise has a dream action with a plus of danger. What does shock and catch you totally off guard is that if ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ leaves the competition in its infancy in terms of technique, his treatment of characters, the dynamics between them and the dramatic charge of the whole They are equally up to the task.
Nostalgia aside —which, it must be said, is treated with care and elegance—, the film takes its time to patiently develop its protagonists; something that limped in the original ‘Top Gun’ and that this time translates into instant empathy that trigger levels of epic and excitementand in the occasional tear during a third act as warm as it is electrifying.
To this day, and except for surprises, I have no doubt that ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ will end the 2022 film course in my Top 3 with the best of the year. And it is that not every day show and emotion merge with such balancesuppurating that charm of the eighties classics frame by frame, and wasting talent personified by a Tom Cruise that, honestly, we don’t deserve.