Why does Tom Cruise walk so much in his films? What is he hunting? What is he running from? At 60, the American actor and producer boasts in Top Gun: Maverick, a late sequel to one of the most mythical titles of his filmography and the 80’s, Top Gun ( 1986). Cruise shows us with Top Gun: Maverick that Tony Scott’s original film, which focused on a group of conceited young men being trained as elite military pilots, was less important because of its patriotic and militaristic connotations – typical of the sociocultural climate associated with Ronald is connected to Reagan’s presidency – as for the rock and roll that his paintings breathed; a sense of vitality and optimism owing to the video clip or commercial, the most avant-garde recordings in most audiovisual media of the time.
The kitschy and vibrant aesthetic of Top Gun’s imagery found a fitting musical equivalent in its soundtrack: Jerry Lee Lewis’ frenetic piano for Great Balls of Fire (1957), Giorgio Moroder’s synthesizer for Danger Zone (1986). Top Gun: Maverick makes dramatic use of Great Balls of Fire again, but combined with an impossible ballad, Hold my Hand, written and sung by our favorite alien singer, Lady Gaga. This factor, combined with the monumentality imbued into the staging by director Joseph Kosinski – who previously worked with Tom Cruise in Oblivion (2013) – yields the elegiac, somber tones of Top Gun: Maverick. Capable of the most unlikely feats of war at the controls of his F-14, Cruise’s brazen military pilot in Top Gun, Pete Maverick Mitchell, is now a reluctant instructor whose legendary status constantly threatens obsolescence and death.
But despite his flirtation with defeat, with the assumption that time is running out, Maverick eventually appropriates the suicide mission for which he’s training a new generation of pilots against the clock, thereby validating the moral and professional credentials he has had guided his life so far. The military veteran teaches his students the importance of relying on intuition and judgment in an era that has entrusted military supremacy to simulations, drones and artificial intelligence, and an existentialist understanding of duty that goes far beyond following rules and Respecting boundaries to devote ourselves fully to the work we have chosen to take on in our day to day.
As in two of his previous films, the extraordinary epics about conquering the useless Edge of Tomorrow (2014) and Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015), it’s impossible not to imagine Maverick’s attitude as that of Tom Cruise himself, a case of A model actor/writer, this is how essayist Alexander Walker describes this double character: “The cinematic image of actors and actresses, especially when they are stars, sooner or later merges with the media and with their real life . The career of a performer thus ends in the projection of an ethics, an aesthetics and a politics of being-in-the-world that go beyond their industrial pigeonholing to evoke a communion with the mythical, a mental imprint in which self-explanatory Structures of reality crystallize.
Cruise dispensed with most of the stuntmen in the physical danger scenes, giving the story an unusual level of veracity.
As the producer of Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise reconnects with his character. He dispensed with most of the stuntmen in the driving, motorcycling, and physical danger scenes, giving the story an unusual level of veracity. He enhanced the image’s plastic qualities by opting for colorful photography, a coherent montage and the least possible intrusion of digital effects. He made sure to have the best technical and artistic team possible and looked out for their welfare during production. And they have fought with everyone to give the film the widest and most dignified screening window possible in theaters. Although Top Gun: Maverick is a sentimental and unimaginative sequel to its predecessor, this comparison between actor and writer gives it a certain grandeur, as in the early scene where Maverick exceeds Mach 10 and the metaphysical sense of his act evokes the most sublime moments by Chosen for Glory (1983) and Mishima (1985).
All of these ingredients ultimately make the film an exercise in resistance against the dominance of streaming platforms and the degradation that their commitment to quantity over quality brings to the forms and charisma of today’s audiovisual medium. Tom Cruise may be the last movie star as we’ve understood that concept for the past forty years, and Top Gun: Maverick removes any doubt about it; although anyone who has followed the actor/writer’s career knows that the implication he has shown on this occasion, put into practice with the innocence and enthusiasm of a Boy Scout, is habitual in him: “I have a passion for life and cinema is my life. And neither life nor cinema can be approached halfway. You have to go all out with both of them, to the end.”
Tom Cruise receives the Palme d’Honneur at the Cannes Film Festival May 18.VALERY HACHE (AFP)
The most striking symptom of this philosophy is the intense foot races he engages in in many of his films, which Cruise has made a trademark. As dialogue from Top Gun: Maverick points out, “He’s the fastest man alive.” That speed, the stunts that have put him on par with jovial silent-movie Mountebanks like Douglas Fairbanks and Harold Lloyd, got him off-screen served well to dodge the lingering rumors about his dating relationships, Scientology, and even his mental state.
The most interesting thing is that this incessant escape from reality and even from himself – because under his smiling facade, Cruise is an enigma shrouded in mystery within an enigma – has a tragic component, as in the umpteenth incarnation could not be less by Jay Gatsby representing the actor. Because although there are good films in Cruise’s filmography, the whole gives the impression of empty intentions and speeches, a simple precision mechanism in the service of his psychological needs. And Top Gun: Maverick is no exception.
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