The sequel to Top Gun, Top Gun Maverick, finally came out in a format that would allow me to watch it without violating my pledge to never spend another nickel on anything Hollywood puts out. It is one of the most hyped films in a long time, the alleged proof that non-woke films are box office winners. Based on what IMDb has posted, that certainly seems to be true:
I have seen figures nearing $100 million for Tim Cruise based on whatever cut he gets. Nice work if you can get it.
I purposely avoided any reviews so I could watch it with eyes wide open to see for myself if it met the hype. After watching it, did it live up to the billing?
Kinda. I guess.
The flying scenes were great, if unrealistic. Cruise is in amazing shape for someone a decade older than me, although the plastic surgery makes it hard to look at him. The scene between Cruise and Val Kilmer was very touching. The opening montage on the deck of a carrier, watching the deck crew work their magic in launching and recovering planes was incredible.
The rest of the movie was just OK.
Plot spoilers ahead.
The main storyline is that Maverick is being called back to train Top Gun pilots for a seemingly impossible mission, flying down a narrow canyon at high speed, avoiding fixed emplacements and superior enemy fighters in order to bomb a very small exhaust vent on top of a reactor housing a uranium enrichment facility. How small?
That all sounds very familiar, down to the way the target is described. In fact it sounds like….
All that was missing was Maverick saying: “I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home, they’re not much bigger than two three meters.”. It is basically the ending of Star Wars.
The holes in the plot were enormous
As for this uranium enrichment facility in an unnamed country (the symbol on the bad guy’s wings is cleverly blurred in every scene)? Well the whole movie is predicated around this heavily guarded facility.
There is what looks like a foot path to this vent. In the other footage of the surrounding area of the facility there is nothing. No roads, no power lines that I saw. Just a single little shack on top of a snow covered depression between two mountains. I assume you enter the facility from somewhere else but damned if I could figure out how you get into the place.
Then there is the reason they have to fly so low down this canyon. There are SAM emplacements all along the route but instead of blowing them up with cruise missiles or some other means, they just plan on flying below them? I know there is supposed to be “GPS jamming” but I am pretty sure they can still hit a target with some sort of missile. Nope, they stay in place because it is important to the plot.
The other piece is that they are supposed to be outclassed by the enemies “fifth generation fighters” and they only send in the four planes needed for the attack. Huh?
The U.S.S. Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) Nimitz-class supercarrier has a complement of somewhere between 60-90 aircraft. Some are choppers of course but from what I can tell they normally carry 34-48 F/A-18 fighters. Even cutting that in half for the four planes in the mission, reserve planes and combat air patrol to guard the carrier, that means at least 18 fighters who could have come in behind the four planes to provide cover for them against enemy fighters. Since they already launched an attack on the facility as well as blowing the crap out of an airbase with cruise missiles, it wasn’t like they needed to be concerned about causing an international incident. With our electronic superiority, they would have made mincemeat out of the couple of surviving enemy fighters but nope. Just these four going solo.
Everyone knew from the get-go that Maverick wouldn’t just train these pilots but would fly the mission. He consistently outflies the much younger Top Gun graduates, apparently being nigh invincible in the air, killing the very best the Navy has to offer with ease. Tom Cruise was 59 during filming or about ten years older than me. When I turned 40 I noticed a significant drop-off in both my eyesight and my reflexes. At 50? It has gotten worse. I can feel it when I play video games, which is far less physically taxing than flying a plane at 5-6 Gs. Somehow Maverick can outfly pilots 20 or 30 years younger than him?
The casting was hit or miss. Miles Teller is very good as Rooster and he looks enough like Goose to be convincing. Jennifer Connolly is OK, but there was no chemistry between them like there was with Kelly McGillis. They seemed more like a couple of friends, maybe that was intended.
Even in a “non-woke” film there was plenty of wokeness. Of the four pilots chosen for the mission, Maverick and Rooster were White because continuity demanded it but the other two were a chick and a black guy. The rest of the 12 former Top Gun pilots….
7 are Asians, blacks, mestizos. Five are White guys. In the real world I am guessing that the ranks of naval aviators doesn’t look like that. The admirals heading up the mission are one hard assed guy who is a jerk and doesn’t think Maverick can do it, and seems willing to let everyone die to complete the mission. He is White of course. The good guy admiral who believes in Maverick is black. Of course.
The weirdest character was Warrant Officer 1 Bernie ‘Hondo’ Coleman, played by Bashir Salahuddin. This guy was everywhere in the film.
Here he is apparently running the show at a top secret experimental jet program. Why is a warrant officer running a top secret jet program? Don’t know.
Then here he is at the Top Gun training briefing. Why is he there? Don’t know.
Now he is in the command center of the carrier during the assault. Why is he there? Don’t know.
Then finally he is on the deck of an aircraft carrier, apparently working alongside the deck crew. Why is he there and how is he remotely qualified to do this extremely dangerous and specialized role? Don’t know.
What can’t this guy do? He is the most versatile warrant officer in the history of warrant officers. Or maybe they just needed a black sidekick to offset the problem of Maverick, Rooster and Connolly all being White.
Anyway. The movie was OK, it was fun as long as you didn’t think much or ask any questions at all. The fact that it was so well received and acclaimed by Normiecons beyond just the obvious nostalgia value tells you just how shitty modern movies are. In a sane world this would have been a maybe $500 million movie instead of a $1.2 billion juggernaut.
One more thing They have ruined for us.
Have you not watched U-571, ti's a known plot point that black men assigned to small roles in regular life then are able to do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING in an emergency. Please make a note of it.
Will I have the time to sit down and watch this with any interest? Don't know. I chuckled a couple times with that response. Penalty flag on the play. Jake Seresin has the call sign: Hangman. O M G! Good thing Mickey Garcia didn't draw COYOTE call sign. BOB looks like one of us…ready to pop.
I was overseas when the first Top Gun came out, and still in the early flushes of patriotism and conservatism. Saw the movie with a group of others from the Embassy and greatly enjoyed it. Needless to say, my political sentiments have shifted dramatically in the ensuing 35 years, as well as my view of Hollywood in general and Cruise in particular. I just cannot make myself watch any movie any longer even if no one profits by it.
The incipient wokeness/nogger worship in even older movies (pre-1965) just slaps me in the face and I will not subject myself to it. Those feelings of honor and faith in one's country or even a degree of belief in its leaders were from another time and place, and they can no longer resonate. That country is dead, and I'm a very different person living in a twisted, anti-White reality. Even just reading about the Top Gun remake all I can think of is the string pullers trying to rekindle some sort of civnat patriotism for whatever war they have planned.
Erich Hartmann thinks poorly of Maverick
Sounds like an LL Bean catalog, with plenty of highly visible non-Whites selling WHITE gear to woke YTs.
I've spent my entire career working on classified radar guidance systems for the navy, and a 3 meter target is actually nothing particularly challenging, to be honest. We target tiny drones now with the surface search units that I write specifications for. I'll see your 2 meter womp rats and raise you one 12 second periscope in high clutter with a PD (probability of detection) of 0.6.
But yeah, no war hawk worth his ribbons is going to send in billion dollar platforms naked like that. Just no need, and ain't gonna happen. And the REAL Top Guns in the fleet? All steely-eyed White guys in their 40s. Arrogant SOBs, to a man. But if it is coming out of MY wallet, no hormonal chick or chickenshit gangsta with a chip on his shoulder is going to grab the stick.
This is quite likely the last movie I will ever see in a theater. Not because it was "bad," but because it was just ho hum average, while the word of mouth on it was stellar. Which just goes to show you that MPAI with no taste, and I can't trust what they say about movies enough to make it worth the trip to the theater. Especially nowadays when it is sure to show up on some streaming channel sooner or later. On the bright side, I did eat the largest tub of popcorn I ever ate in my life, the melted butter penetrated all the way to the bottom kernels, and I'm convinced it caused me to gain 5 lbs
There was a LOT of suspension of disbelief required in this one. Much more than the first Top Gun, which also required some but nothing excessively stupid. Not going to go into all of it, why bother
I saw this film the other night with my twenty year old kids. I watched it because right wing types talked it up. I thought it was stupid but kept my mouth shut because the kids liked it. The casting with the girl pilot and NPC asians was particularly cartoonish. The black guys were unlike any blacks I’ve ever been forced to work with (and carry the load). I agree with this review, which, if anything, is too gentle.
You would think I had learned by this point.
Bob is the prototypical White guy in media, dorky and awkward and constantly being mocked by his cooler non-White peers.
My point to a lot of people cheering the remake was that They will take that 1.2 billion or whatever and promptly use it to fund dozens of subversive anti-White films.
I haven't anywhere near the technical background but I assumed what you are confirming. Even as far back as Officer and a Gentlemen the naval aviator class (I always hear that in Lou Gossett Jr.'s voice) had two blacks and a chick. I suspect that if I had access to class photos of Top Gun for the last two decades it would be as colorful as Miracle Whip on white bread.
The first movie seemed more realistic but when the entire premise of the film requires you to turn off your brain, unless it is something really loud and explosive like Pacific Rim, it simply isn't fun. I think the last film I saw in the theater was Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015 and that was one that simply isn't the same on a small screen.
It is part of the cultural cognitive dissonance, you see blacks on the screen that are smart and articulate but then you meet them in real life and they are the opposite.
I was on lookout duty during some exercises in the USCG and identified a periscope off our port bow. Called it down to the bridge and they did not believe because sonar had not picked it up. Pointed it out to the officer with the conn, and created a shit-storm with sonar, fire control, etc. No one could believe it. A submarine was right on top of us and the only way they knew was because a bored seaman was scanning the waves.
I shoulda got one of them there medals that Miley is sporting.
LOL