Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Top Gun: Maverick
I saw this at the cinema earlier this year and like most people who saw it (I presume), came out of it thinking fucking hell that was GREAT.
Rewatched tonight with my parents and for a big chunk of it was thinking "oh, it's actually a bit shit – all this rubbish dialogue and hammy acting, this trading on nostalgia and tugging on the heartstrings by drawing your attention to Tom Cruise, the symbolic immortal, being right on the cusp of ageing beyond repair, and it's military propaganda"...
And THEN, in the last let's say hour, a flurry of some of the most exciting action sequences I've ever seen, which even on my parents' relatively diminutive flatscreen, had me on the edge of the sofa and grinning like an idiot.
It clicked at this point that a big chunk of the people who think this is a fantastic film (and were pissed off at the Guardian for putting it so low down their top films of 2022 list) come out of it feeling that way because of the last hour and more or less forget about the rest of it.
I couldn't document this experience in the "without reservations" thread so I thought I'd invent this one.
This thread will also allow me to recommend with reservations Guillermo Del Toro's very much flawed but also occasionally quite brilliant stop-motion Pinocchio adaptation. Another film, in fact, that doesn't seem to be much cop until you reach the end, which is surprisingly moving and makes the rest of it seem retroactively much better.
I saw this at the cinema earlier this year and like most people who saw it (I presume), came out of it thinking fucking hell that was GREAT.
Rewatched tonight with my parents and for a big chunk of it was thinking "oh, it's actually a bit shit – all this rubbish dialogue and hammy acting, this trading on nostalgia and tugging on the heartstrings by drawing your attention to Tom Cruise, the symbolic immortal, being right on the cusp of ageing beyond repair, and it's military propaganda"...
And THEN, in the last let's say hour, a flurry of some of the most exciting action sequences I've ever seen, which even on my parents' relatively diminutive flatscreen, had me on the edge of the sofa and grinning like an idiot.
It clicked at this point that a big chunk of the people who think this is a fantastic film (and were pissed off at the Guardian for putting it so low down their top films of 2022 list) come out of it feeling that way because of the last hour and more or less forget about the rest of it.
I couldn't document this experience in the "without reservations" thread so I thought I'd invent this one.
This thread will also allow me to recommend with reservations Guillermo Del Toro's very much flawed but also occasionally quite brilliant stop-motion Pinocchio adaptation. Another film, in fact, that doesn't seem to be much cop until you reach the end, which is surprisingly moving and makes the rest of it seem retroactively much better.
