Today we’re carrying on, in no particular order, with the GG list of the best films of 2022. I will put them in (some kind of) order for you towards the end of these posts. For now, though, we’re just looking at them individually and exploring why they’re on the list at all.
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Top Gun: Maverick was always going to be here. Of course, it was. Only the most contrarian fun sponge publication would even consider leaving it out of the top ten.
What’s left to be said about this movie? Not a lot, so this will be very brief and will contain a mild spoiler.
As a sequel, it’s bigger, bolder, prettier, louder, and hits the nostalgic bullseye at 550 knots. The commitment to in-camera action set pieces is exactly what we’ve come to expect from Cruise and the only negative thing one can really find to say about the movie is that its Covid delay pushed the next entry in GG’s much-beloved Mission Impossible series into next year… We’ll be losing our minds about that one come June 2023…
True, our rewatch also revealed the tooling of the movie. It is ruthlessly mechanical in its mission to entertain, payloads despatched with ultra-efficient timing borne, no doubt, from scores of NDA-strewn test screenings. There’s an old Hollywood template clearly visible beneath the surface, a hero’s journey as obvious as Cruise’s acting tics.
And of course, it’s a wildly expensive recruitment campaign for the US Navy. Hell, part of the reason they were even able to make it this way at all is that the Admirals in charge at Miramar now were in their early 20s back in 1986 when the original film landed, famously bringing an increase in recruits at the time.
But, oh my life, this is fun. Cinema does a lot of things, but for most of us, it’s simply entertainment. Now, this is not an original idea, but the very best cinematic entertainment, by definition is action. Why? Well, the clue’s in the name, folks. Movies. Motion pictures.
Since movies were invented to win a bet that all four of a horse’s feet leave the ground in gallop, the portrayal of movement is indivisible from film. Action is indivisible from movement; one can neither exist nor proceed without the other. Film and action are bedfellows.
Sure, computer games do action increasingly well, but cinema exists for action. Geek Graffiti’s favourite film of all time is an action movie and part of the ethos of that film, Mad Max: Fury Road was that it should work just as well in black and white cinematography or as a silent film. It’s invested in the history of cinema, the history of action cinema.
More than any genre, action movies throw down the gauntlet to those that follow them: “beat that,” they growl with a swagger. Time and again, filmmakers push beyond the boundaries of what is considered possible in order to meet that challenge and Cruise is notorious for it.
There’s a story from Top Gun: Maverick that encapsulates this.
When Maverick has to prove that the mission can be done, the movie moves up another gear and never relents. The scene features him flying his F-18 at speeds of 550 knots through Toiyabe Canyon, sometimes as low as 30 feet from the ground. The concentration required is intense enough, even before you account for huge G-forces on the pilot.
Like every flight scene in the movie, it was flown for real, in this case by Frank ‘Walleye’ Weisser, with Cruise acting and filming himself in the rear seat. They did it in one take… partly because no one had ever done it before and because Weisser had no intention of doing it again. That’s some insane commitment to entertainment.
If, for some reason, you were unlucky enough to miss this in the cinema, then be nice to your friends with home cinema systems, because another thing worth mentioning about this film is that it has had the best 4k disc release of the year (so far!). It’s staggeringly good. Find someone with a copy and watch it on the biggest screen you possibly can. Top Gun: Maverick is a triumph of old-fashioned action cinema… you’d have to be dead or comatose not to enjoy it.
