Thoughts about Top Gun: Maverick

The hottest movie topic in 2022 was Top Gun: Maverick.  I am sorry, my friends who loved this movie, but…

The biggest problem I have with this film is the same problem I have with the final three Star Wars films in the saga: rehash.

  • The same title card and Faltermeyer/Loggins intro music.
  • The same fighter jet porn in the intro.
  • Goose’s son wears Goose’s exact same mustache.
  • The fighter pilots are approached from behind in an ambush-introduction.
  • The motorcycle scene with his girlfriend (even riding in the same direction as the original scene). Same jacket, same motorcycle.
  • The stupid sunglasses they all wore in the first movie and in this movie; they were on-point stylish in 1969.
  • The mission is almost identical to the mission the rebels undertook in Star Wars: A New Hope… a very small force is tasked with skimming a narrow canyon to hit a small opening in the enemy base, and the mission is saved at the last minute by an arrogant pilot who was not part of the original plan.

Also…

  • He steals an F/A-18?
  • The ultra-sonic test jet flying over North America? Never happen. Supersonic flight of any kind is done over the sea.
  • The task group fires a spitload of Tomahawk cruise missiles at one runway. Each one of those costs about two million dollars, and just one of them would be adequate to take that airfield out of the fight.
  • Or, you could use the Tomahawks to actually do the mission.
  • No one with bitter feelings about the instructor would even be assigned to the mission, no matter how skilled he or she is. Direct conflict of interest.

Also, this job doesn’t really seem like a job for the Navy and carrier-based warplanes, but an Air Force task with something like the B-2 Spirit long-range stealth bomber. And why are these jets attacking anything without air superiority, like a real-life mission the Israeli Air Force did in 1981.

By the way, Iran is the only nation in the world to have any F-14 Tomcats in service, so duh, it’s Iran. But of course, the presence of the F-14 was shoehorned in to get Tom Cruise back into one for the final scene, and, of course, with Goose’s son in the back seat.

A note about G-forces: this happens when an aircraft is experiencing a lift vector that changes the attitude of the aircraft. The instant an aircraft stops that vector by leveling off, regardless of the direction it’s nose it pointed, the G-force falls back to normal. We see these F/A-18s pull out of the attack, and the pull-up maneuver is what creates the Gs. An aircraft climbing straight up or diving straight down is not experiencing high G-forces.

The bottom line is, for me, that Top Gun: Maverick is easily the most over-rated, over-anticipated movie in the last five years. I didn’t really enjoy it.

Top Gun: Maverick
Top Gun: Maverick