Danger Zone 2: This Time it's Not Danger Zone 1

 

Well, since I reviewed Top Gun, it only seemed appropriate to review the sequel as well.

30 years later, Pete "Maverick" Mitchell is still a great pilot, though he's moved from instructor to testing experimental aircraft, and finds his job on the line thanks to Admiral Cain (Ed Harris), who aims to replace pilots with drones. But OH NO! Another vaguely defined "enemy" (who may or may not be the same one from the first film) has built a super dangerous uranium plant, and the Navy needs a special team of fighter pilots to deal with it. And wouldn't you know it, Maverick's old friend Tom "Iceman" Kazinsky (Val Kilmer, in his last acting role) has recommended him to train the new squad. 

Despite the reluctance of his commanding officer Beau "Cyclone" Simpson (John Hamm), Maverick is assigned to take a group of top gun graduates and prepare them for a potential suicide mission. But there's another problem - one of the candidates is Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw, the son of Maverick's old co-pilot Nick "Goose" Bradshaw, and there's some complicated history between them. 

I wasn't entirely sure what to expect going into this one. Part of me was worried it was going to just be the first movie all over again, or it was going to feel like it was still a product of the 80's. And it proved me wrong. Top Gun Maverick takes full advantage of the 30-year gap between installments, allowing it to explore how things have changed over time. The increasing prevalence of drone warfare was an interesting thing to see explored in the opening, though it perhaps could have been given more attention. We get to see how characters have grown and developed. 

And the film takes advantage of the time jump to give us a much more varied group of characters. There's actually a woman on the team this time around. Natasha "Phoenix" Trace (Monica Barbaro) is a member of Maverick's strike team who, while not the primary focus, does get her share of action scenes. 

It is nice to not just get ANOTHER male bonding film.

Perhaps one of the biggest surprises in this film was the return of Val Kilmer as Iceman. You'd think this would be a logical choice since he was a big part of the first movie, but at the time Val Kilmer was suffering from throat cancer that prevented him acting in other roles. He'd previously been unable to reprise Mad Martigan for the Willow miniseries for this exact reason, yet they somehow actually got him to come back, if briefly, for Top Gun Maverick. And they made an interesting decision for how to do it- by actually incorporating the actor's condition into the character. It limited his screentime to one scene, but that one scene makes the most of him.

The romantic plotline in Top Gun Maverick is definitely an improvement over the original. While the sudden and unexplained disappearance of Kelly McInnis might be jarring to longtime fans, they actually do pretty good with new love interest Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly). It probably helps that they forego having Maverick do any cringey "romantic gestures" and she isn't his teacher this time. She actually feels like a new character and not just "Charlie but with brown hair." The film takes its time building up their relationship but, unlike the original, the romance portion seems to gel a lot better with the rest of the film. It doesn't feel like they're suddenly putting the movie on hold for Tom Cruise to get laid.

One thing that's interesting about Top Gun Maverick is how it manages to mirror scenes from the first movie without feeling like it's directly copying them. It makes for interesting moments, like when Maverick himself is introduced to his class in a scene that feels suspiciously reminiscient of Charlie's reveal as their instructor. Even the opening, which is very clearly modeled on the first right down to using the same font for the credits, feels more like an homage than a direct copy.

And of course, there's the flight sequences which... still look amazing. Maybe a bit hard to follow at times because of all the rapid editing, but they still give you a sense of what the characters are feeling amid all the fast-paced action. It even builds on some of the original's cinematography, experimenting with a few new techniques, like filming a takeoff from inside the cockpit.

I wasn't entirely sure what to expect Top Gun Maverick to be but this... well, it actually does pretty good. Sequels can be hard to pull off, especially when the original is such an icon, but Top Gun Maverick actually does the seemingly impossible and arguably improves on the original Top Gun in many ways. It captures everything that got people into the original and builds on it, creating something that calls back to the original while also feeling like it's own movie.

Apparently, there's a sequel in development. It will be interesting to see where they go with that.

Tossing Good Ideas Into Oblivion

I've realized recently that I haven't watched a lot of science fiction in a while. It's always been one of my favorite genres and last year I found myself writing about it a lot, but I haven't touched on it much in a while. Naturally I got to thinking that I should try watching some more science fiction films, and while looking for popular options I happened to find Oblivion through HBO on Demand. I didn't have super-high expectations but I do recall finding the trailers interesting when I first saw them back in 2013. I never got a chance to see it, something not helped by the fact that it came out around the same time as the similarly-themed After Earth, which I understand was not a very good movie at all. I decided to give Oblivion a watch and see if it was anything worthwhile. I'm not the biggest Tom Cruise fan but I know he can do good sci-fi/action if Edge of Tomorrow was anything to go on. Sadly, Oblivion doesn't live up to what made Edge of Tomorrow such an interesting experience.

It is the year 2077, and there has recently been a war between humanity and an alien race. Humanity won the war, but the Earth was destroyed so now Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) have to serve as a "mop-up crew" to destroy what's left of the aliens and deplete Earth's remaining resources before going to Titan (because, you know, a freezing cold moon orbiting one of the furthest planets from the sun with an atmosphere of nitrogen and methane seems like the perfect refuge for what remains of humanity). Unfortunately, it turns out there is something weird going on when Jack discovers that the "aliens" are actually humans led by a mysterious survivor named Beech (Morgan Freeman). Along the way, he also encounters his ex-wife Julia (Olga Kurylenko, who between this and Quantum of Solace really needs to find better action roles). Some stuff happens and it turns out that he's actually been working for the aliens and then Jack tries to make a stand while Victoria refuses to get involved and Julia keeps getting pushed aside.

Really, the treatment of the women here is probably the one of the biggest problems in Oblivion. Both Victoria and Julia end up being little more than a cheap love triangle when they each had potential to be interesting characters. Instead, Victoria just seemed too annoyingly stubborn. I wouldn't have minded the romance between Jack and Julia if they'd just given her more to do. Most of the time she's just following Jack around and being told to wait for him. Julia had potential to be a strong female character, and she even gets and opportunity once to get tough only to fail miserably and get saved by a male character who has almost no personality beyond being distrustful of Jack. It even got to the point where during the climax, the script seemed to deliberately keep her from playing any useful role. Unlike The Rock, I'm not sure this is any active sexism and more just bad writing, but it's still a load of wasted potential. The rest of the cast isn't all that much better.

The story itself I found also to be full of interesting ideas, but overall very weak. There is some suspense at first but after a while the twists start to become obvious, at least until the end when things just get confusing. Suddenly there's a big action scene and a bunch of people we don't know get killed but Jack has some sort of plan to thwart the alien invasion. The plan makes very little sense and ends up being a convoluted mess. Even the aliens, when they are finally encountered, don't turn out to be all that interesting. The one thing I can give the movie credit for is it does have some very good visual effects, but that's not really enough to save it.

However, even with the effects there was something weird that seemed to be going on. Oblivion was obviously influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey in many ways. That should hardly come as a surprise, seeing as the majority of contemporary science fiction borrows something or other from that film. The weird part is how it is constantly incorporated into the visuals, to the point where the "drones" seem to be heavily modeled after the pods and there is even a series of shots depicting figures in a position very suspiciously reminiscent of the "Star Child" from the end of 2001. It felt a lot like Oblivion was just trying to be 2001, which didn't make sense since it was clearly not even remotely in the same area of science fiction.

My advice? If you really want to see Tom Cruise stop an alien invasion, just watch Edge of Tomorrow. It's a far better film with interesting ideas that are actually used and it even has a strong female lead. Admittedly I've seen far worse than Oblivion, but I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone. There are some amazing visuals but that's about all you're going to get, since otherwise it's just a bunch of dull characters, some of whom have absolutely no personality, getting involved in some convoluted plot to overthrow some race of aliens that never really feel like a serious threat.