Tuesday, April 18, 2023

Top Gun, Maverick 2023

Meh.  Not as good as the old Top Gun.  Very long.  A lot of chit chat between unnamed and unknown characters standing around the bar.  Little of interest was said.  Navy brass was bearing down on Maverick, trying to get him out of the Navy.  In the Air Force we made much of our aces like Robin Olds.  Why a couple of snooty admirals want to dump their hottest ace is unfathomable.  The flying scenes don’t really start until half way thru the movie.  The target is a uranium enrichment plant way behind enemy lines.  The plan is to fly up a deep and twisty riverbed, staying too low for the SAMs to get them, and bomb the deeply buried enrichment plant out of existence.  Maverick gets a dozen young hotshot pilots to train, plus he must select only half of them to fly the mission.    After none of his hotshots succeed in training, Maverick flies the training course himself and aces it, naturally.

   I wondered about some of the flying scenes.  The fighters seemed to climb and turn better than I expected.  I was left wondering if I was watching CGI or real aircraft.  At one point someone refers to “front landing gear”.  I never heard anyone say that in the Air Force, it was always “nose gear”. 

 

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