There was a huge amount of CG obviously. Yes they shot real actors in real cockpits in real flying jets but unlike the first top gun most of the significant flight footage was CG
My very positive post above was also from homewatching. The movie is ace. I will not be moving from Soapyfrog’s lawn.
Meh, it’s overrated. By a lot.
I’m on the lawn too with a sign saying this is the best movie of the year.
If you like transformers then maverick is the movie for you.
I’ll say it’s a good example of the type, but there’s not much to recommend it beyond the special effects, which are good if completely absurd. Jennifer Connelly Ed Harris and John hamm are wasted. The supporting cast is very very very weak. Miles teller looks and sounds woefully out of place. Tom cruise is like some kind of acting robot.
The first was better on every level.
Haha nope. But opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and most of them stink.
Movie of the year? Almost but imo (and I’m a huge plane nerd!) Everything everywhere all at once was even better.
Granted! It was still fun to watch just a let down what with all the people claiming it’s movie of the year.
Happiness is lowered expectations and all that
It would take something very special indeed to supplant Everything Everywhere All at Once this year, but Top Gun: Maverick is one of the rare sequels that bests the original.
For some reason I thought Everything Everywhere All at Once was some sort of stupid Love Actually type movie, I think based on the people who recommended it.
Also, the jet shots and sound in Maverick are better than the entire Transformers movie franchise combined.
Ryan put out a Pitch Meeting for this - and I’ll be honest I never made that connection…
LOL at “Characters can survive pretty much anything if you don’t show how they did it.”
Late to the party as usual, just watched it in retail, and I get both the love and the hate.
This is by the book sequel borrowing so much from the first one, where the plot requires physics and the real world take a backseat (e.g. which foreign territorial sovereignty are they violating this time? We didn’t even get a name, intentionally. Iran? But too arctic. Doesn’t matter…)
And yet… on paper everything is recycled leftovers heated on borrowed potplot, but the way it executed is flawless. It is like injecting dopamine directly into my brain from my eyes. And that Lady Gaga end credit song is just the icing on this impossibly soylent green of a movie, that I will happily consume again knowing full well of its ingredients.
Ward Carol (retired F14 RIO) interviews former F15 back seat WSO (Weapon Service Officer) and they discuss the bombing run in the movie. Bottom line, it’s all actually quite accurate in many details:
Maverick doesn’t survive the crash at the end of the prologue. The rest of the film is the hallucination of a dying man dreaming of reconciliation and redemption.
Sounds about right.
I dunno how this showed up in my youtube feed, but I ended up watching the full 8 parts
It’s two former pilots (one air force, the other navy) talking about Maverick in depth (i think the full 8 parts runs longer than the movie). I wish they explained some more of the things that they talked about in detail, but I still really enjoyed it. Figured some of you might dig it too…
If you’re into that www.fighterpilotpodcast.com did a great series on Maverick as well. I like jell-o more than mover. Don’t know why.
I finally got to see this, on a flight appropriately enough. I thought it was pretty great. It felt like roughly the right amount of callbacks, explicit callbacks such as old footage, old photos, references to Goose, etc. but I’m fuzzy on that. Maybe I wanted less since my age group knows the original so well, maybe more would have established it better.
Anyway, I assume that’s Hans Zimmer that did the opening music with the leading gong that then transitions into Highway, that was perfect. Still hit me directly in the nostalgia, and I really liked that they dug deeper on the carrier crew and showed them doing their cool movements and whatnot.
I also quite liked the main plot with the canyon run, that was much more novel than bringing bac Maverick as a random instructor and then a fight luckily happens. No rivet counter me, but it did bug me a bit with the weapons. AtoA missiles aren’t used from 200 yards, I don’t think they’ll even arm at most of the ranges depicted, and flares aren’t a magic shield that always works. The SAMs were a bit silly and if a missile explodes within any of the ranges depicted that aircraft is out of the fight or a ball of flame, they’re more or less designed to prefer to explode at those distances, it’s just more effective.
The gun fights were great, the flying was great, the grunting was pretty great (not sure I buy that a 50+ guy can take more Gs than a bunch of mid-20s Naval pilots at their peak) and the visceral movement was spot on, again as someone who knows nothing outside of Tom Clancy books from the 80s. I really appreciated the crazy thruster move the 5th Gen fighter did and their reaction, though it seemed a bit silly that anyone was surprised by it; that’s been around for 15 years minimum and a trainer/test pilot and a current Naval fighter pilot would be well aware that it was possible since they established F35s are a thing. But BONG doo doo doo dadoo, then duh dah duh dah duh dah dah dah! pretty much sealed the deal.