Watched Top Gun for the first time in many, many years last weekend.
Truth be told, I lost my interest in fighter jets when the Air Force recruiter told me my eyes were too bad for F-16s at my high school’s career fair. But my wife and I weren’t able to make it to the PRIDE parade and wanted to commemorate the Supreme Court’s landmark decision on gay marriage by watching the most homoerotic movie ever made.
I mean, come on:
So it was a bit of a weird coincidence to see these comments the other day from Skydance CEO David Ellison about the in-development sequel:
This world has not been explored. It is very much a world we live in today where it’s drone technology and fifth generation fighters are really what the United States Navy is calling the last man-made fighter that we’re actually going to produce so it’s really exploring the end of an era of dogfighting and fighter pilots and what that culture is today are all fun things that we’re gonna get to dive into in this movie.
In addition to giving us a really first class run-on sentence, Ellison paints a pretty boring picture. Will Pete “Maverick” Mitchell spend the film sitting in a cubicle in Nevada, raining death from above on al Qaeda and ISIS targets in Yemen and Syria? Is he suggesting the pilot who was deemed “dangerous” by Iceman will be in actual combat with drones? Because I’ve seen a Predator fly and even if they had to pull Maverick’s old F-14 out of retirement (they were removed from the active Navy fleet in 2006), it would still fly circles around that thing.
Then again, perhaps they’ll be using the new F-35s. In which case, it sounds like it might be more of a fair fight.
Perhaps Maverick becomes disillusioned with the military-industrial complex, steals a fighter, and flies to the Middle East and shoots down every drone he sees before Iceman, called back into active service after a decade spent going to seed as a Gulfstream pilot for the Kardashians, pursues his old rival for one final showdown. Val Kilmer wouldn’t even have to get too method for that one.
Of course, we all know that’s bullshit. Ellison mentioned Cruise playing “the fossil,” meaning he’ll be hooked up with one or more overconfident whippersnappers whose egos are writing checks their [bodies] can’t cash. My guess is a mission comes up that those smart-assed drones just can’t handle, requiring Old Man Maverick to show these young punks what it’s like to fly actual manned airplanes over Macho Grande to carpet bomb something into oblivion in the name of freedom and well-oiled pecs.
Maybe they can do a tie-in with the Magic Mike series.
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2015.
