(Spoilers for Top Gun: Maverick lie ahead)
Over the weekend, Top Gun: Maverick exceeded box office expectations, becoming the highest grossing weekend of Tom Cruise’s career and setting a new Memorial Day weekend box office record. A lot will (justifiably) be made about what this means for the theater experience at a time that seems very critical. Covid is by no means gone (which I, um, experienced first hand last week), but audiences swarmed back to watch Tom Cruise fly a fighter jet. It felt cathartic. [Ahead there will be spoilers for Top Gun: Maverick and No Time to Die.]
Since the pandemic started there was a lot of talk about what movie would save theaters. I’m honestly less interested in that and more interested in the movie that would save us. You know, in a world of nonstop terrible news, the movie that, just for a little bit, has the power to make us feel happy. I can’t remember a movie, that was released in theaters only, that almost everyone I know has now already seen. Top Gun: Maverick is a phenomenon and I truly believe the reason why is less about all the cool airplane stunts (and they are very cool) and more to do with this is a movie that makes us feel good. Honestly, I kind of forgot that it was okay to let myself feel good about something. Top Gun: Maverick doesn’t really give us a choice in the matter. You will leave this theater in a good mood, dammit.
And I hope people are paying attention to what made this movie a success. In an era where every would-be blockbuster has to be overly complicated and convoluted, Top Gun: Maverick is a sleek machine of a throwback. People have been watching older action movies for the last two years, remembering how great they are, and wondering why they don’t make them anymore. Then here comes Maverick to say, you know, maybe we can still make them like that. It very much feels like a precise vision of what an action movie should be and does not stray from that vision.
Is it so wrong to just want to watch a movie where the hero wins the day? It seems to happen so infrequently now it’s actually surprising when it does happen. What’s notable about Top Gun: Maverick is literally none of our heroes die during the mission. None of the characters are used for cheap emotional weight. (And the one character who does die, off-screen, has actual repercussions in the plot in that Maverick no longer has protection from a superior officer.) It’s a great concept that, to Maverick, if one team member dies the whole mission, in his mind, is a failure. And by gosh he’s not going to let you leave that theater having watched a failure.
The movie I also kept thinking about this weekend was No Time to Die. A convoluted mess of a movie (to be fair, a lot of James Bond movies are convoluted) in which, after 25 movies, everyone involved thought it would be cool to watch James Bond die. Now, to be fair, both No Time to Die and Top Gun: Maverick were filmed before the pandemic started and had no idea what the world would be like when they were, respectively, released. But I swear, after everything we had been though, all I wanted in the world was to watch James Bond save the day and float off on a raft into the sunset with a lady, like he’s done time and time before. It’s honestly borderline malpractice they unleashed that movie on us without a warning. “Hey, it’s been a tough few months right, well what if we also kill James Bond? Pretty cool, right?” I’ve been rewatching a lot of Bond recently and it’s jarring how much fun these movies used to be and it’s annoying we’ve been watching this sad drip James Bond for the last 15 years. (For the record, I really like Casino Royale and Skyfall, but whoever they cast as Bond next, please please make him “fun.”) Yes, past Bond movies have had sad endings (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is a bummer of an ending) but, I’m sorry, I don’t watch James Bond to ruminate about our own mortality. I want to see James Bond win the day. The timing of No Time to Die really, really sucked. I left that movie in a terrible mood, which kind of defeats the purpose of watching a James Bond movie in the first place.
There were times during Top Gun: Maverick I worried we were headed for another James Bond situation. But by the end of the movie I had made my peace with that possibility in that, unlike No Time to Die, Top Gun: Maverick was a movie with actual emotional weight (as opposed to a movie about nanobot germs) and would have earned that ending. And Top Gun: Maverick brings us to the very edge a few times. But, in the end, no one wants to see Maverick die (other than enemy pilots and maybe Jon Hamm’s Cyclone). Not now. Not after all this. We all have seen enough actual real death. Just let us have our brief feeling of fictional triumph. Let us feel good about something. It’s the reason we like going to the movie theater in the first place. And this past weekend people went back. If Maverick had ended on a downer I truly think there would be repercussions in a “I can feel sad at home” kind of way. But instead, people left Top Gun: Maverick on cloud nine and I’m sure more than a few people rediscovered why they liked going to the theater in the first place. In the end, it was Maverick who saved the day.