This has already been outdone.
I think my favourite bit is where he punches to the other guy to the tune of “INDIA! OCCUPIED! PAKISTAN!”
That honestly looks awesome for everything but the airplane bits.
So good. It’s what we’d have if Hollywood had kept going with 80’s Chuck Norris / Arnie / Stallone war action style flicks instead of Superhero movies.
I don’t know that I’d say the plot of TG2 was recycled so much as it relies upon archetypal character development tropes, as did TG1 (and as do a TON of other movies - especially military-oriented ones).
I do agree about the franchise desire tho, but without Cruise (or Kilmer, obv.), it will go nowhere unless they do something incredibly special, ala Fury Road - and even that as a franchise is questionable - they need to hit another out of the park to establish that.
I just want to see an aviation movie. Like there’s this squadron during wartime, and there’s the old cynical pilot and the young naive pilot and the life of the party pilot and the angsty pilot and the asshole pilot and they fly sorties and some of them get killed and they’re sad because war is bad and then there’s a big mission and they win at the end but the survivors aren’t happy because war is still bad.
How hard is that to script? Training is boring and it’s basically saying “we didn’t have enough budget for the flying scenes”. Romance is great, but not in this movie. If two of the pilots want to cast sultry gazes at one another that’s enough, and let them kiss in the fanfic or something. I just want to see good flying scenes. And yeah, okay, some reason for there to be at least one dogfight. Which suggests making it a WWI movie to begin with, but if the F-35s run out of missiles on the first leg of the sortie that’s fine too.
This exists, though the name escapes me. Had the rough cast you’re talking about, including a fat guy who wound up on fire and shot himself rather than burn.
I’m going to be the devil’s advocate and say writing a (non-derivative) script featuring modern jet fighters is probably very, very hard, given that you’re locked into a rigid military organization that is for the most part doing a very specific job with tons of constraints, all of them fighting your ability to give your characters agency and leeway for drama. That’s why scripts on pirate ships or multi-crew vessels like bombers or submarines, past or future, are more prolific and frankly more interesting, they can be zooming and shooting and also have people share each other’s space.
I imagine a futuristic mecha jetfighter movie would be easier too, as you can world-build your technology to be more flexible and self sufficient to let you land in weird places and have the plot develop in tenuous places, away from your airflield… but then you’ve alienated half the audience that eyerolls at scifi.
I think the reason Independance Day ('96) was such a fun ‘air-combat’ film is they threw away the need for military rigidness and had a cowboy persona dogfighting with an F-18.
Flyboys is the one I was thinking of, it was panned but fits the bill.
Red Tails fits that description too, and has jet-age Nazis as bad guys as a bonus.
There’s definitely a range of films out there that fit the bill!
Could probably throw Hurricane into the hat also
Hurricane (2018 film) - Wikipedia
A lot to catch up on @Miramon!
I hope you saw 2022’s best aviation movie… Devotion. Great real plane footage, true story not overly embellished, only one scene with really over-the-top CGI AA added.
THAT’s the kind of movie I’d like to see more of. Shame it didn’t do better, and that Jonathan Majors’ involvement is now a negative.
My wish for TG3 scenario: a loosely connected collection of slice-of-life vignettes showing the day to day in a hard charging, boozing, womanising 60’s fighter squadron culminating in a mission that replicates operation bolo.
TG3 script proposal
Maverick, after the events of TG2, gets pulled back to Top Gun school which is on the verge of getting closed down as the Navy is pivoting to newly developed UAV fighters. The UAV fighters, using AI and other scary tech, can out turn any human piloted vehicle and is considered unbeatable. Maverick and his rowdy Top Gun pilots are given one chance to develop new tactics where the humans can out-think the AI to obtain victory.
At first they lose badly. However after a bar scene and a sports montage they beat the AI UAVs. At this crucial moment, an adversary to the good old US of A starts using AI driven UAVs to attack US Naval planes. Maverick and the crew are dispatched to a carrier to head off the attack and end the threat. Cue Danger Zone. Cue credits.
Thank you, and I’ll await the royalties check.
It’s surprisingly hard to find relevant screenshots from the movie Best Defense. That is all.
I think that was the plot to Macross II.
I’d never heard of Best Defense so I had to look it up.
In the article is this gem quote from Eddy Murphy who was hosting SNL:
"After I did 48 Hours and Trading Places, all these scripts started coming from everywhere, and I picked up a script called Best Defense . There’s a movie that sucked real bad! At first, I wasn’t going to do it because I read the script, and I felt like I was an actor at first.
But the money they gave me to do Best Defense , y’all would have done Best Defense too, OK? … I was like, ‘What?! How dare you give me a script like this! Oh, that much money? Let’s go!’ Best Defense turned out to be the worst movie ever done in the history of anything, and all of a sudden, I wasn’t that hot no more.
So, I called up the producer of Saturday Night Live , and I go, 'Um, you still got my dressin’ room?"
Hah, I never knew that! 13% on RT so it’s pretty bad, I remember it as a kid but . . . kid . . . so I loved it because there was a lot of action and a special effects drone in it.