Living in the Age of the Reboot: "Maverick"

It's either me or you who's crazy. It can't be both. Or...maybe it is?

One of the most gloriously ridiculous moments in '80s American action cinema comes at the end of the second act of Iron Eagle. Two pilots – a crusty old instructor and a plucky young upstart – are flying on a terribly risky mission into an unnamed country to rescue the kid's father. But because of some kinks in their plan, they're running seven minutes behind schedule, putting everything in jeopardy.

Then the plucky young guy announces that he's got something that will help them make up some time. He puts a cassette into the cassette player in the cockpit of his fighter plane; this plays some triumphant music, we cut to a shot of the planes zooming along, and then cut back to the instructor, who exclaims: "Alright! We made up three minutes!"

The whole thing, from idea of a cassette player in the cockpit of a warplane to the notion that playing inspiring music can make a plane go faster, is just fantastically silly. As is the whole movie, from top to bottom, featuring everything from a "suspenseful" race between a dirt-bike and an airplane to an advanced new American super-weapon which when it explodes creates…a ring of flames. As if somewhere deep in the Pentagon, a general has been pounding his fist on the table and declaring that what will really help America win the wars of the future are bombs that make circular walls of fire.  

I bring all of this up because if I were in a slightly more sarcastic mood, the piece I'd be writing would be about how they released a new reboot of Iron Eagle this summer, and called it Top Gun: Maverick. I would point out the enormous numbers of similarities between the films – because in almost every way, the Top Gun reboot/remake/sequel is much closer to Iron Eagle than it is to the original film – and use that as a way to make fun of Maverick, which a large part of me believes really should be made fun of.

But I'm going to try my damnedest to resist that urge, and instead do something that's probably more profitable (spiritually, if not financially): try to talk about the movie, which I felt was flatter than Ricardo Montalban at the end of The Naked Gun, in an adult way…and then consider why my reaction may be dead wrong.

So what are my complaints? These boil down, more or less, to the following.

1. Maverick suffers from a terrible lack of charisma.

In large part, this is a matter of comparison. The original Top Gun starred Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer and was directed by Tony Scott, all three of whom are incredibly accomplished at projecting charisma onto the screen, and it's just slathered in masculine sexual energy – so much so, in fact, that this is probably what the film is most directly "about." Is that energy at times ridiculous? Of course! From Cruise quipping with his buddy Anthony Edwards to the way Kilmer clicks his teeth, from the "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" sequence to the closing "You can be my wingman" bro-moment, the whole thing is put on by men who just feel so damn good about themselves that they are oblivious to most of the other things going on in the world. But here's the thing: that steamy self-regard has a strange gravitational pull. And in most blockbuster movies, memorable scenes aren't memorable because they're well-written or well-acted; they're memorable because of their gravitational pull. They stick with you when you watch them, so much so that when you're checking into a hotel room and turn on the TV and that scene is playing, you find yourself standing there like a dullard watching it, regardless of whether you really like it or not. What makes movies like this memorable, in other words, is not quality but something closer to an inane audacity.

For me, although apparently not for the vast majority of critics and audience members, the comparisons between Top Gun and Maverick in this regard are pretty damning. A great, small, example of this occurs in the sports sequences. In Top Gun the boys famously play volleyball, all oiled-up and glistening in the sun; the reason the scene has been so commented-on and parodied is its combination of magnetism and sheer obliviousness. It's as if the movie is so obsessed with a certain type of male energy that it itself has paused, like a dullard, to ogle these male bodies.

In Maverick, the scene is repeated (as it must be, by law, in a reboot) except that now they're playing, and for those of you who haven't seen the film, I swear I'm not making this up, touch football with two balls at once, so that both teams are playing offense and defense at the same time. I apologize for saying this out loud, but this is just a stupid conceit. More damning, it lacks any real filmic force. We are neither titillated nor stirred to feel that (yes, adolescent) sensation of "watching cool things happening." The bodies and escapades that appear are shot in medium or long takes, and passed over quickly; the whole this is a mash of editing that has no tempo and builds no feeling; or there is little sense that anyone is trying to create something new – instead it feels very much like they're doing "a sports montage." (For the real nerds among you: the action movie sequence it resembles most is perhaps the touch-football scene from Point Break, which is ultimately saved by the closing tackle into the breaking wave; here, however, there's no closing shot like that, nor does the sequence move the story, as that final shot in the Point Break sequence does, into an important piece of character reveal: "You're Johnny Utah?!")

What made the original volleyball scene in Top Gun so sneakily (and unintentionally) amazing was that all over the country, red-blooded American boys watched it and thought Man, those are the kind of guys I want to be!, only noticing much later (if at all) how gay the whole thing was. But first they were entranced, captivated by the blockbuster magnitude feeling of it. And while there certainly may be kids out there who watched the double-football-made-up-game sequence in Maverick and thought that they wanted to join in, my bet is that most of them registered it as something slotted easily and comfortably in among innumerable similar sequences they'd seen before, and acknowledged it, if at all, with a kind of bemused shrug.

It's the same throughout Maverick: scene after scene is just okay, but lacks any real magnetism, any of the spark, the charisma, that elevates the best blockbuster movies.

2. Maverick suffers from a remarkable inability to generate any feelings of reality.

Now, let's not get carried away and start pretending that Top Gun is some stripped-down realist work in the vein of Roberto Rossellini. It's a gushy schoolboy fantasy about flying fast, honoring your buds, and whipping ass on the Ruskies. But, given this creamy '80s action veneer, it also works hard to allow the viewer to engage in the fantasy that what they're watching is a version of reality.

In Top Gun, we're anchored into the real world (or "real world") by things like the geopolitical backdrop of both the opening and the final sequence – centered on the Cold War with the Soviets – the opening title cards that explain that the fighter-pilot school is a actual place, and specific references to the wars in Korean and Vietnam. Beyond this, though, there is a real skill with details. The interior and exterior locations feel like the environs of San Diego – the set decoration, in particular, is impeccable throughout – and the characters feel like the kind of human beings they are supposed to be. Spend any time around people, and men in particular, who are engaged in the kinds of super-elite activities that these people are – "The Best of the Best" – and you will find rooms so absolutely full of arrogance that it feels like a giant, horrible marshmallow squashing the life out of everything else present. Top Gun captures that.

Maverick succeeds in virtually none of this. Again, I hate to be the guy who says this, but the main bar set where some of the action takes place is both poorly realized and poorly imagined, both of which are terrible sins for a movie of this budget. It does not look (particularly the exteriors) like an actual place so much as a Hollywood movie person's idea of a "cool bar." In a remarkably similar way, the movie doesn't name any specific adversary, but instead imagines a "country" which is in possession of "fifth generation" fighter planes, that are supposed to be really, really dangerous. It's rumored they may even be able to achieve "ludicrous speed," in the immortal words of Dark Helmet. Which is to say that the whole setup feels rather imaginary, cartoonish, perhaps, dare I say it, even like a comic book. Is it any sillier in its details than the trope in Top Gun (dutifully repeated here), of having a plane fly ten feet above another plane, inverted, so the pilots can take Polaroids of their adversaries? Not really. But one never feels, watching Maverick, that one is tied to reality in any way; what one is tied to, I think, is something I'll get to in a moment.

One effect of this lack of contact with reality in the film is that it never manages to generate any true feeling of danger. Consider the way the two films open. In Top Gun a cocky American pilot comes up against some Soviets and gets so freaked out by the possibility of death that he quits flying altogether; this instills in us from the very beginning the sense (ridiculous as that sense is if we step outside the film) that this is a deadly serious business: if a badass Navy pilot is that scared, it scares us too. In Maverick, the reboot strictures demand that we get a parallel opening, and so the film gives it to us. And here, the precipitating moment is that…Tom Cruise flies a plane really, really fast. Is it an okay opening? Perhaps, although it does feel pretty contrived. But what it's not about is instilling a sense of the danger or seriousness (again, adjectives that are used advisedly here) of being a fighter pilot.

Or think about the way the films handle death itself: in the former, Tom Cruise's beloved navigator is killed in an accident, while in the latter, two young fliers are almost injured in a crash, but not really, because the next day they're back and flying again as if nothing happened. Once again, something in the original film that is oriented towards making it at least feel serious is turned into little more than a vague gesture in the reboot. It's kind of dangerous because someone almost got injured.

Which is to say that Maverick dispenses with the attempt to create a sense of actual peril, even insofar as that sense usually exists in an action movie. This is, of course, always a tricky thing, because we know from the start that the hero of an action movie is not going to die. But the reason so many of them do what Maverick does not – kill off sidekicks, and work as hard as possible to make the bad guys seem dangerous in some kind of way that at least has resonances with reality – is to allow us the thrill of the sense that over the course of the film, an actually dangerous situation has been faced and defeated. Here? Not so much.

3. Oh, man, what is up with the plotting in Maverick?

Let's note at the beginning that it's hard to plot a movie about fighter pilots absent the backdrop of an actual war. Aerial combat can be exciting (and from a direction standpoint, Scott's handling of the sequences in the original are so far superior to those in the remake as to be nearly of a different sort, in my opinion) but it's hard to draw out that kind of excitement to the length it takes to float a whole movie.

The original film accomplishes this by dispensing with a good number of the elements that usually populate a war/adventure film. Instead, it gives us a brief war scene at the beginning, and then the majority of the film operates like a high-school drama, in which a bunch of young men are thrown together, form little cliques, and compete with each other in exciting ways. The main character is trying to overcome the stain of his bad family name (in the high-school flick, he's usually a poor kid; here, his dad purportedly messed up during a dogfight), and engages in a love affair; he's also trying to come to grips with his own bad habits, and in the course of this his best friend is killed. This sets up the ending, in which we return to a war sequence, and the hero has to overcome his guilt about the death of his friend as well as his bad habits (Don't ever leave your wingman, Mav!) to triumph.

Maverick takes this structure and tries rather disastrously to graft it onto the classic war/adventure film plot in which a surly commander is given a group of raw recruits and has to lead them on an impossible mission (something like The Dirty Dozen is a comprehensible comparison).

The failures here are many and resplendent. The training sequences don't really have much tension. We don't really spend enough time with the secondary characters to care much about who they are as people. The main mission itself is like the contrived ending of a Bond film, with random and inane hazards thrown in at random (the bad guys have for some reason decided to build their McGuffin at the bottom of a crater, and forgot to put any anti-aircraft defenses in the big canyon that leads right up to that crater). Should we also note that this mission itself is a naked rip from Star Wars, such that the fighter pilots have to navigate a tight corridor at high speed, and then drop their bombs into an air shaft no bigger than a womp rat? We probably should. And does the guidance system fail at the last minute, forcing the pilot to use the force? Of course it does.

Beyond this, though, the whole thing is put together almost haphazardly. Here's an example of what I mean. In the first film Tom Cruise and his randy classmates are hanging out in their fighter-pilot bar, and he sees a gorgeous woman. He first sings to her, and then, when she resists this charm assault, he follows her into the bathroom to proposition her more directly, his famous grin on his face the whole time. The following day, he finds out that this woman is his instructor in school. From a plot perspective, this serves as yet another way to turn up the heat on our protagonist: not only is his family name not the best in the Navy, and not only is he the loosest of cannons, but he has denigrated his instructor on the night before his first class. Vitally, though, the scene also serves to reinforce the issues around which the film revolves: the existence of intense, narcissistic male arrogance. You may or may not like what the film has to say about this topic, but you cannot argue, I don't think, that the film isn't carefully constructed, such that virtually every element goes to this central obsession.

Here's the analogous scene in Maverick. Tom Cruise is sitting in the fighter-pilot bar watching the young pilots he's going to mentor. Instead of picking up chicks, as the pilots tried to during their bar scene in Top Gun, these pilots are playing a semi-competitive game of pool in which even their dorkiest member gets involved. Then Cruise makes the mistake of putting his cell phone on the bar, which, by bar rules, means that he has to buy everyone a drink. He does, and the pilots cheer while making jokes about the old guy. But then Cruise can't pay the bill because his credit card gets declined, so he gets physically thrown out of the bar by the young pilots. One of them – the son of Cruise's friend who was killed in the original – then plays a song on the piano which is a callback to the first film, and Cruise stands looking in the window, feeling, we are led to assume, sad and guilty.

I'm tempted to say that the best thing that can be said about this sequence is: I guess it almost works? I mean, is the idea that the young pilots mock the older one because he's old and poor, and then are embarrassed the next day because they find out that he's their instructor? That's okay, so far as it goes, but by "okay," I mean pretty mediocre. Because Cruise's real sin – in terms of the structure of the scene – is that he has a cell phone and is broke, and I'll be damned if I can understand how these things have anything to do with the rest of the film. And in larger terms, are we supposed to think the movie is about the younger generation coming to terms with the idea that those decrepit old Boomers that they've so negligently thrown out onto the sand are actually alright? Again, like, sort of? But here's the weird thing about that one: Cruise is, throughout the film, a better pilot than every single one of the young fliers and they never get to be as good as he is. In the action sequence that closes the film, Cruise is in the front seat and his young piano-playing mentee is in the back seat, sitting there uselessly and reduced to saying the same thing his dad once did: "Do some of that pilot shit, Mav!" i.e., "I'll never be as good a pilot as you because I don't even know what that 'pilot shit' is, so please save me." So is Maverick maybe about putting those youngsters in their place and showing them how they'll always be a bunch of infantile goons when compared to the older generation? I guess? Or not really? And is this the best plotting and writing they could come up with in a film on which they spent $170 million?

And this is not just a one-off failure. Throughout, the film gestures in all kinds of different directions and tries to pull all kinds of different meanings into its embrace, contradictions and nonsense be damned. Very little of it holds together if one stops to think about it, which is, of course, exactly what one is not supposed to do.

As you can tell, I didn't think that much of Maverick. But virtually everyone else, as I noted in the opening, seems to have loved it. And by loved it, I mean competitively spewed encomiums all over the internet and social media, and also viewed it enough times that it earned a ton of money. That leaves us with a couple of possibilities. One is that I just missed the boat. Maybe I'm wrong about the film, and it's actually full of charisma, feels real and dangerous, and is tightly and effectively plotted, and I just didn't see it right.

But there's another possibility too. Which is that what's going on here is that modern audiences are looking for something totally different out of an action film, or, perhaps better, responded to something totally different in this action film.

Charisma is the easiest one here. If I had to choose an adjective to describe the folks on screen in Maverick, I think it would be "gentle." Even the most arrogant young pilots in the film aren't really obsessed with their own arrogance, they're misguided. In the double-directional-football scene, the young pilots find that the best way to live is when no one is a jerk to each other, no one really wins or loses, and everyone gets to feel included. The love story between Cruise and Jennifer Connelly is sweet and rated PG in every sense; the most pressing concern of the film is the one expressed by Connelly's teenage daughter: that Cruise not break her mom's heart

This last example is significant: maybe the way the gentleness comes out the most clearly is that the main attempt in the film is not really about trying to titillate us by showing us what fighter pilots are really like, or to titillate us by allowing us to hang out with people who think they're better than everyone else; instead, it is to create a full-on, Spielbergian reconstitution of the nuclear family and rapprochement between the generations. Tom Cruise gets to save the son he never had, who in turn gets the father figure he never had; Cruise and Connelly fall in love, creating a new family unit in which everyone gets what they want: Connelly and her daughter overcome their fear of heartbreak, and Cruise, who's never been able to settle down because of the ghost of his lost buddy Goose, finally gets to do just that.

So perhaps the better way to understand the film is that Maverick is not interested in charisma at all. Instead, it's interested in the presentation of a world in which no one is lifted above anyone else by their smile or their ability to score chicks, a world in which blockbuster charisma is something that can be shared in by all people equally.

This brings me to my second disagreement with the film, which was about its lack of connection with reality. One of the ways to understand this disengagement from the real world is to understand that reboots and remakes and (contemporary) sequels do not primarily engage with actualities. Instead, their subject matter is the already-created world of another movie, the eternal doubling of nostalgia. The reason there is nothing striking or original in Maverick is that audiences are not going to it for striking or original things, so much as they are for the familiar satisfaction of seeing something old in a slightly (but not too) different form.

It is a film about the repetition of familiar rituals, of old scenes; there is no reason for it to attempt to touch the world outside of the screen, because the entirety of its effort is to reach backwards and inwards to the comforting world of something that already exists on the screen. To ask it to engage with reality is thus to ask it to do the wrong thing. Its purpose is pure engagement with the past; its function is to allow people who remember the first film to be once again awash in nostalgia, and at the same time to allow younger generation to assuage the fear that they missed out on anything, because now they, too, have a Top Gun.

There are also economic reasons for the lack of reality in the film. The easiest way to see this is to think about why the writers and producers of Maverick decided not to name an actual country that the United States might be striking preemptively: dollar bills, baby, dollar bills. Make the enemy an actual country – Russia, or Iran, or North Korea – and you put not just domestic but foreign box office receipts at threat (Maverick made almost $800 million internationally), because the idea of America actually using its military force against another nation spoils the fun. Better to put it in a world of pure imagination, with "5th generation fighters" and Star Wars homages, where fighter pilots killing one another is just something that happens on the screen.

In this sense, the comic book sensibilities of the film do something else: they allow the audience to enjoy its visceral entertainment – missions that are hard to accomplish, brightly colored things moving fast, sentimental relationships, bombs that make circular rings of fire, etc. – without ever having to worry about the anxiety instilled by the idea that these things might actually exist (in this form, or perhaps a more serious one) in the real world. The American audience for Top Gun lived in an age in which they'd been amped up to see themselves in an existential ideological conflict with the Soviet Union, and so their version of wish fulfillment centered around grinning flyboys showing the world how much better they were than those nefarious black-plane baddies. The audience now – global and domestic – lives in an age in which the things that are most desired are "thrill-ride" sensibilities combined with gentle, anodyne social messaging. And Maverick gives them this with a resounding success.

Of course, the killjoy in me really wants to note that this creates a kind of radical cynicism in Maverick that doesn't exist in Top Gun. The older movie is pretty directly a pro-military, "Go America!" conservative fantasy about the redemptive possibilities of violence. But it does not try to hide this; rather, it glories in it, and in this sense it at least has the virtue of honesty.

Maverick, on the other hand, presents itself as just a fun picture with lots of exciting things happening in which everyone gets to feel good about themselves. But it leverages this by titillating the audience with the idea that killing another human by flying around in a badass airplane is about the coolest thing there is. By abstracting itself from reality, in other words, Maverick lets the audience glory in militaristic violence while almost explicitly denying the thing that Top Gun, to its credit, engages with directly: that the glorification of this kind of violence is always connected to politics and ideology, even if we wish it weren't.

But, hell, it's made close to $1.5 billion. So maybe it's a great film after all.

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