★★★★ Watch again, the first Top Gun (which is 35 years old) – and whatever Tarantino said about it being a gay movie – was Tony Scott’s first attempt at a celebration of the movement in film. He was not, yet, the great Tony Scott of Unstoppable or Déjà-Vu, but he already had something in how he showed the movement of bodies, people working and planes in the air. The story didn’t matter at all. Three and a half decades later, this Top Gun is almost a remake with Maverick no longer as a student but as a teacher, and with much better technology that further underlines the “sensation documentary” side that the first could only outline. Here it is the air, the open space, the sun, the clouds that matter. And it is Tom Cruise, who is not so much an actor but -the metaphor is the only possible one- that plane himself that unites us from the land of paying a ticket to the heaven of cinema. Nothing else matters, only that there is a sufficient framework for movement and space to surround us for a long time. No matter, either, the nostalgia: although educated by the cinema of the 80s, this editor is not only not a fan of the first film but he does not buy vintage but only the cinema that, from the past or the present, always seems contemporary. That is the difference between that one and Maverick: this continuation is, unlike its matrix, pure free present.
