Tom Cruise saves the Occident – and maybe even the cinema. From right to left, the flying action catches the eye: some gloat over militarism, others discover homoeroticism in it.
Maverick (Tom Cruise) pirouettes in the twilight.
“Is the rifle still flying?” The New York Times wasn’t sure, and others were skeptical too: would a sequel to Top Gun, that 1986 aviator film from the stone age of action cinema, still lure anyone out from behind the stove?
Aren’t we too old for that, and does anyone still get out of the house and go to the cinema? “Top Gun: Maverick” is symptomatic of American mainstream cinema, which is “in a total crisis of creativity”, the colleagues from “NZZ am Sonntag” determined in the run-up to the film’s start. Always these sequels.
SRF Online painted Trump on the wall and was annoyed about “the right propaganda film for these times”, in which the USA was “great again”. And doubled in a second post that “cool fighter pilots” had fallen out of time today: “The fact that this uncritical military film starts of all things while there is a war in Ukraine does not benefit him.”
Cruise, the divine
So one could have assumed a belly landing: wrong film, wrong time, impossible place (cinema). Instead, Tom Cruise now pirouettes in the twilight and triumphs over the art judges. Like the divine Helios in the chariot of the sun, he steers the F/A-18F Super Hornet in the sky, a beaming mermaid on, but also off the screen: Yes, Tom Cruise, this Elon Musk of the film world, overambitious and with an urge to the stratosphere, defies his 59 years as well as the gravitational forces in the cockpit of a fighter jet.
The industry magazine “Variety” takes off its hat, Cruise has accomplished a “mission impossible” with “Top Gun: Maverick” and makes moviegoers “leave their house and pay money to see the sequel to a 36-year-old film”. .
Cruise showed it to everyone again. Scene from «Top Gun: Maverick».
Even by pre-pandemic standards, the spectacle brought in a fantastic 260 million US dollars worldwide (although the markets in China and Russia were omitted); Cruise has never had an opening weekend anywhere near as successful. Why is everyone running into this movie?
Because, one might assume, there are no (spider) men with superpowers in leggings fighting their way through computer graphics. But real people, real craftsmanship: In the very first scene, our hero stands in a hangar and turns a screw in the belly of an old airplane, he still wears the aviator glasses from back then, the iconic leather jacket has also held up well.
From Saab to “Top Gun”
More than half of US movie tickets were sold to those over 35. Director Joseph Kosinski serves the demand for nostalgia, nobody is too old for good entertainment. This is vital for the cinema industry. Another insight: After 36 years, this is not a sequel, but a reunion, and reunions are a pleasure. When the daring Maverick hatches another crazy plan, one suspects: “I don’t like this face.” “Mav” replies dryly: “It’s the only one I have.”
Tom Cruise has only one face, the film’s success has many. It is interesting to look back: At the time, no one expected any flights of fancy from the previous film. Director Tony Scott was hired because of a Saab commercial in which Scott chased the passenger car parallel to a fighter plane over the runway. And most critics didn’t see anything more than a military recruiting video in the film, which only became a hit through word of mouth in the Reagan era.
While the majority of reviewers saw machismo and militarism at work, some stared at Tom Cruise’s tight jeans and drew very different conclusions: to the great film critic Pauline Kael, the film seemed like a “brilliant homoerotic commercial”. It shows the elite fighter pilots strutting about in the locker room, “Towels hang precariously from their hips and when they talk to each other they stand head to head.”
In short: For some, “Top Gun” propagated a masculinity that is often apostrophized today as poisonous and heteronormative, while others interpreted the film as an expression of suppressed homosexuality. Or third possibility: You watched the action and saw injured masculinity. For example, the cultural magazine “Salon” analyzed the film because, significantly, it begins and ends with a panic attack.
Tom Cruise’s career took off in 1986 thanks to “Top Gun”.
The VBS also loves the film
The point is: The new “Top Gun” does something similar, you can appropriate it as you wish. In the LGBT community, Instagram accounts can be plastered with stills of fit fighter pilots playing rugby in swimming trunks; the liberal magazine The Atlantic is delighted that Maverick is fighting a nameless enemy (“This time the hero isn’t America, it’s Tom Cruise”), while the right-wing news network Breitbart is celebrating a film that, thank God, “isn’t bit woke” but “testimony of American excellence”.
Everyone arranges the film the way they like it. And why should the military spectacle not fit into the time of the Ukraine war? Heroic figures are in demand, Selenski proves it; the invocation of a morale comes in handy too. Incidentally, the defense department in Bern recognized this surprisingly quickly and used the blockbuster to advertise pilot training with commercials. So: the rifle is still flying, and almost everyone is on board.