CULTURE
FILMS by Sister Rose Pacatte, FSP
TOP GUN: MAVERICK
40 • August 2022 / StAnthonyMessenger.org
Christopher McQuarrie, with music from Hans Zimmer, Lady Gaga, and others. Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly, who plays Penny, a single mom whom Maverick once dated, is the romantic interest. Top Gun: Maverick is very entertaining and even inspiring. The film belongs to Cruise, Kilmer, and Teller. The meeting between Maverick and Ice, whose health is in obvious decline, is as warm as it is hostile and competitive. Themes of forgiveness, reconciliation, brotherly love, and humility abound. But the women, even Phoenix, are given far less to do in the film. In the background is the constructed geopolitical context of bombing an enemy country without any attempt at diplomacy and killing pilots who have no faces. A-3, PG-13 • Battle violence, peril.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT FATHER STU THE ADAM PROJECT LUCY AND DESI TICK, TICK . . . BOOM! SPENCER
TOP GUN: MAVERICK: PARAMOUNT PICTURES
THIRTY-SIX years after Tom Cruise’s Top Gun blasted into theaters, the sequel arrives without missing a beat. When Maverick is fired from his job as a test pilot by Admiral “Hammer” Cain (Ed Harris), he is reassigned to the Top Gun Academy in San Diego where he once trained. Neither Cain nor “Cyclone” (Jon Hamm), who commands the flight school, want Maverick to go to Top Gun, but his old nemesis, “Ice” (Val Kilmer), now the commander of the US Pacific Fleet, decides that Maverick is needed. The fighter pilots are needed for a top secret mission, and Maverick is the only one who can train 12 pilots (including a woman, “Phoenix,” played by Monica Barbaro) from which six will be chosen. Though we never find out where it is, the pilots learn that a uranium enrichment plant has been detected in a hostile country and must be destroyed. One of the young pilots is “Rooster” (Miles Teller), son of “Goose,” Maverick’s friend and radar intercept officer, who died in a training accident with Maverick in Top Gun. There is tension between Rooster and Maverick from the get-go, just as other tensions play out in the film, some of which will remind fans of the original. Joseph Kosinski does a stellar job directing this sequel. The action-packed and emotional script was penned by a trio of writers, Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and
