Three completely different pieces marked my childhood and were an integral part of what I do and am today. The first is a Billiken magazine. The second, The Little Prince. The third, Top Gun.
While Billiken and Anteojito (two magazines for children) were two classic companions until the end of elementary school, a specific edition has a privileged place in memory, even with a lot of blurred details. A cartoon of the attack on the Sheffield during Malvinas war is the first memory I have of something I read on my own. I was four years old in 1982, and according to my parents I started reading much earlier, but I have the almost photographic image of that comic book in my head.
The Little Prince came later, and it is a book that I read countless times and that I recommend reading as you get older because you find different meanings to each sentence. It is a personal tradition to give this book as a gift and to recommend this continuous reading and constant rediscovery. Even though, at times, it is sad to realize how that innocence is lost and how much one misses it.
One of the things I understood as a grown-up is how powerful the dedication Antoine de Saint Exupéry makes to his best friend:
“To Léon Werth
I ask children who may read this book to forgive me for dedicating it to a grown-up. I have a genuine excuse: this grown-up is the best friend I have in the world. I have another excuse: this grown-up understands everything, even books for children. I have a third excuse: this grown-up lives in France, where he is cold and hungry. He needs a lot of consoling.
If all these excuses are not enough, I will dedicate the book to the child whom this grown-up used to be, once upon a time. All grown-ups started off as children (though few of them remember). So, I hereby correct my dedication:
To Léon Werth
when he was a little boy. “
And we come to the third piece, Top Gun. And I must start with two important caveats: one, I am old. Another: growing up, there was nothing to spare at home and we didn’t have a VCR. Occasionally we would rent the equipment for a weekend at a local video club (I imagine scores of millennials reading this with anthropological curiosity) and my dad would let me rent one or two VHS that I would watch when the TV was not in use.
Some of my friends already had or were incorporating the long-awaited VCR (the wealthy had a tape recorder, the less wealthy just the player) and so we watched the classics: I still remember watching Terminator at Pablo Escobar’s house.
Yes, I just realized that when I was a kid, I had a friend named Pablo Escobar. Anyway. On one of those weekends, Top Gun was on at the video club. I asked for it, we took it and after an interminable wait I got the TV for myself. And that Friday night was the first time in my life that I saw Top Gun.
I’m not exaggerating if I say that I watched it about a dozen times that weekend. And that I begged so hard and for so long to see it again that eventually the effort was made, and a VCR came home. And, obviously, a copy of Top Gun.
Before that I had gotten a poster that is another of the images I have etched as a photograph in my head: a Grumman F-14 Tomcat seen from below, with 4 AIM-54 Phoenix, two AIM-7 Sparrow, and an overwhelmingly blue sky in the background. I looked at that poster countless times. I dreamed about that plane even more.
I learned everything there was to learn about it and extended that need to know to the rest of the things that fly. That curiosity that began to take shape with Malvinas and the FAA solidified with each re-watch of the movie. With every look at my poster.
I watched Top Gun so many times I’ve lost count. I had it on every platform ever. I know the dialogue by heart. I leave it on in the background when I write for the page. It’s an integral part of my daily life.
When rumors of a Top Gun sequel first started, I was afraid. Second parts, they say, are never good and perhaps a new iteration would ruin what one idealizes and holds in one’s soul in a way that only one understands.
Because Top Gun can be analyzed from the filmic point of view, the plot, the acting, the script, and a thousand other things: details that the little Pablo, or the adult Pablo, care extremely little about because the quasi-scientific dissection of that which is carried in the soul is a privilege reserved for a small group of idiots.
With that certainty I entered the theater: knowing that Top Gun: Maverick must be aimed at two audiences. A generation that reveres the first film and another that grew up outside its influence and today even has the luxury of evaluating it from a different perspective. In many sequels and reboots of sagas, one of the two audiences is disappointed. The film that appeals to the nostalgia of the first group does not meet the expectations of the second, or vice versa.
I must say that, fortunately, this is a rare case where we seem to get both audiences right. Stripped of the nostalgia of the original, Top Gun: Maverick is a fascinating spectacle. Immersed in nods to the first film, it lives up to what those of us who dreamed – and feared – a sequel had hoped for.
It won’t have the best script ever, or the most gripping, or Nolan-like plot twists, or be that film that Kubrick didn’t get to make. The first one was not, the second one is not. It doesn’t have that intention. It’s not what I went looking for. I wasn’t expecting it, it doesn’t surprise me, and on that point, it doesn’t disappoint. And that’s the key.
When you wait so long for something, the bar is set so high that it’s hard to get anything close to what you dreamed of, no matter how good it is. Top Gun: Maverick gave me what I went looking for. And that’s a lot. A lot.
The flying sequences are incredible, and the attention to detail speaks of a respect for the viewer that only a monster like Cruise can demand and deliver. Say what you will about him, but he knew where the bar was set. And he delivers.
Designed for IMAX, I highly recommend watching it in that format. The quality of the product is second to none and it’s perfectly understandable that they delayed the release so people would see it in the theater. It’s not a Netflix movie, although by the time it comes out, I’ll be watching it thirty times a week. It’s one of the best bastions of resistance for the cinematic experience these days. It’s what movies are about.
Given what I expected and what I got, Top Gun: Maverick is the perfect sequel. It’s the closing of a circle that opened when I was a kid, when I watched that poster for hours. When I knew everything there was to know about the Tomcat. When that little airplane itch started and never left.
In the titles there are mentions and acknowledgements like in all the other movies you saw or are going to see. But in this one I didn’t need to see it on the screen. I felt that as the letters ran there was a special dedication. One that only I could recognize. For me, a second before I got up and left the theater, the screen read:
“To Pablo
when he was a little boy.”
