With films like “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” the film industry found a way to get global audiences back in the movie theatre in 2022. This comes in direct contrast to many laments declaring the death of cinema in the 21st Century
“Top Gun: Maverick” fulfilled the Need for Box Office Speed
“Top Gun: Maverick” wasn’t just a shameless corporate rehashing of an old franchise to capitalise on nostalgia. Twitter would have you believe it was, but it wasn’t. It was a spectacle made for the silver screen, big and packed with suspense and wall-to-wall action. Tom Cruise shifted focus from the intense threats of the looming apocalypses of the Mission Impossible franchises to deliver a film that, in stakes and setting both, was self-contained, granular and intimate. It was also, to paraphrase Martin Scorcese, not particularly profound or revolutionary, and “closer to a theme park than a movie.”
Just like a rollercoaster at a theme park, people often chose to go for multiple rides. I, personally, went 15 times – two more than Hangman actor Glen Powell’s own parents. These figures are dwarfed by the infamous Singaporean, Chris Paul, who told Geek Report that he watched the film a fanatical 45 times over 45 days. The re-watch value on this clearly has no real point of diminishing returns for those wrapped up in airborne heroics interspersed with rivalries and resentment, old and new. The film is indulgent of adrenaline, bookending the storyline with nail-biting flight sequences that last well over ten minutes each, but don’t fatigue or wear on the psyche. The cinematography is beautiful and shamelessly picturesque, inhabiting every pixel of the 16mx20m of an IMAX screen.
The larger-than-life quality of the cast, especially Tom Cruise, Miles Teller and Jennifer Connelly, gave this film a timeless and dreamlike veneer,…