Top Gun: Maverick

Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick.(Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures)

Decades after originating the role in Tony Scott’s legendary film, Tom Cruise returns to the big screen as Pete Mitchell in “Top Gun: Maverick,” hoping to capture lightning in a bottle once again. If ticket sales and audience reception are any indication, it appears they certainly have. “Top Gun: Maverick” is a monster hit, exceeding expectations laid out by so many late sequels and retreads over the last decades. So what sets “Maverick” apart from so many middling attempts at nostalgia?

For one, Maverick has a keen eye for what worked about the original film. There are real planes filmed doing real stunts, with CGI playing a supportive rather than dominant role. This is Tom Cruise’s modus operandi, preferring real, physical stunts even when they put his own body (and life) in peril. The film also benefits from incorporating other elements of a Mission: Impossible movie—namely, having an impossible mission at its center and a team of heroes attempting to accomplish it.

Another key to its success, which may also be understood as a flaw, is its inoffensiveness. While the movie celebrates military heroism, it does multiple barrel rolls to avoid naming the country where the mission is taking place, preventing any serious reflection on sovereignty and militarism. (Nothing would change about the movie if the base they are targeting was operated by extraterrestrials.) The movie also largely keeps the original's machismo masculinity, doing the bare minimum to introduce one competent female character to the squad. In some ways, this movie feels designed to appeal to our baser instincts as movie watchers: planes go boom, good ol' boys get the job done, America wins against enemies that don't have identities. 

To the movie's credit, there is an interpersonal dynamic that raises interesting questions about love and freedom. Mimicking a sort of parental relationship, Maverick has to learn that to love someone means giving them the freedom to make their own choices (even mistakes.) With all its silliness and blockbuster-tendencies, I find it refreshing to see a movie remind us that love is fundamentally non-coercive and non-restrictive, but liberating. 

Jurassic World Dominion

image credit: Landmark Media/Alamy

“God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’” Genesis 1:26-28

The translation of “subdue” and “dominion” in this passage has long been disputed. Is our relationship to the earth one of care and responsibility, or control and domination? As our planet continues to be devastated by the largely irreversible effects of climate change, brought on and exacerbated by our need to extract every ounce of profit from the land regardless of the outcome, we see how very catastrophic bad theology can be.

In that sense, Dominion is great subtitle for Jurassic Park movie, as the series wrestles with the same questions at stake in our translation of Genesis 1: humanity’s (in)ability to respect the power and forces of nature, and the dangers of trying to harness (and monetize) forces that are greater than ourselves. The series’ heroes are those who recognize their place as stewards of and partners with the chaos of nature, and those who try to control or manipulate usually find themselves on the wrong end of a tyrannosaurus (though arguably there’s isn’t a right end.)

This series, however, hasn’t worked well since long before the B.C. era (Before Chris.) In an ironic way, this franchise has mimicked in its filmmaking the very thing it critiques: going again and again to a well that has long been dry, extracting every ounce of remaining profit regardless of how it spoils the source. In this latest (and allegedly final) entry, Dominion looks to the ever-bankable nostalgia, bringing back series veterans Laura Dern, Sam Neil, and Jeff Goldblum, without giving them very much to do. The pairing of these original Jurassic Park characters, whose primary heroism was survival and surrender, with the characters of the Jurassic World trilogy who punch, stab, and clothesline dinosaurs, creates an unstable concoction--like the classic science-fair volcanoes made from vinegar and baking soda.

As much as ever we need movies remind us of the dangers of trying to control the uncontrollable, and to monetize ourselves to death. Nonetheless, even studios should learn the timeless truth from the original film: that just because it can be lucrative to do things like bringing dinosaurs back to life, or fracking oil from the earth, or bringing Laura Dern back to a franchise to say things old people think young people still say like “slide into my DMs”… it doesn’t mean you should.

Movie Review: Dr. Strange

(IMAGE CREDIT: MARVEL STUDIOS)

With Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (MoM), the MCU officially embraces the insanity of inter-dimensionality. The multiverse has profound implications for the future of the MCU, but comic book fans know that such a vast potential can offer both excitement and risk. Marvel comics have been playing with the multiverse for decades, and has both delighted and exhausted fans in the process. On the one hand, the multiverse allows for amazing possibilities--like seeing 3 different Spider-Men on screen, or merging universes so that new heroes like the X-Men and Fantastic 4 can join the Avengers.

At the same time, it can dramatically lower the stakes for an audience. Multiverses have been used in comics for cheap gimmicks, often so that Marvel can have their cake and eat it too. Want to have a major character die to amplify the stakes and emotions (and sell a lot of comics?) Not to worry, we can always find get another one from the multiverse and bring them back whenever (so that we can continue selling comics.) Bringing this into the movie universe means that significant deaths, like Tony Stark, Black Widow, and so many others, can be undone in ways that rob their significance.

MoM plays with all of these possibilities but with a light touch. It uses the multiverse to show Steven Strange various versions of himself, the end result of choices he has yet to make. With a glimpse at the implications of his choices on himself, his relationship, and an entire universe, Strange is able to identify the dark side of his impulses and actively work against them. On the gimmicky, fun side, MoM uses the multiverse to show us classic Marvel heroes in the Illuminati, and hint at their future use in the movies, even as we watch them get decimated by Wanda.

When I was reflecting on the risks and rewards of the multiverse, I couldn’t help but consider the parallel to Christian eschatology (the study of “last things.”) Ultimately, what Christians believe about the end of everything can be similarly double-edged sword. To believe in the reign of God, that an alternative world with vastly differing values that has collided with our own through Christ, is sort of like embracing a multiverse. There are some Christians who allow it to challenge the way they live now, like Strange did: contrasting the realities where we allow ourselves to be driven by greed and fear, and actively working to create a different reality. However, there are also those who use it as a cop out, wanting to have their cake and eat it too. If another world is coming, and I’ve determined myself as “in”, there are little stakes to my decisions and how they impact the world.

I would be remiss if I didn’t engage an important critique of MoM, which I think bears reckoning for Christians who understand forces like patriarchy to be not part of God’s reign. While the MCU has now produced 28 movies and 6 miniseries, only three focus on female heroes, and both were released in the last 5 years, one of which was WandaVision. While WandaVision presents a well-rounded, character who commits grave harm, MoM turns the most powerful female character in the MCU into a noncomplex villain, and unfortunately ties her villainy to motherhood. Because Marvel is so far behind in providing adequate female representation on screen, they have not earned the benefit of the doubt here. With so many female-driven movies and shows on the docket, though, the story of Wanda may not stand out so much as Marvel’s definitive read on the intersection of womanhood, motherhood, and power.

I hope that the MCU is able to utilize the multiverse for the best it has to offer: deep character studies that cause reflection and change, and a little bit of fun on the way. In doing so, I hope that Marvel Studios continues to reflect on its own impact as a primary cultural storyteller and uses that platform to represent the world not only as it is, but as it should be. Similarly, my hope for my fellow believers, as we embrace our own eschatology of madness, is that we see in the forthcoming reign of God the opportunity for reflection and responsibility to become the type of people who would be citizens of that new world.