The CB Nation crew review Top Gun 2, and debates whether or not Doctor Strange 2 ruined Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch. We also review the new Batman Unburied Podcast, and breakdown Marvel and DC Comics!
Oftentimes with decades-later sequels, stories come from a place of greed. There’s an assumption that a brand can be revived with guaranteed success and a fresh crop of faces leading the charge; but for Top Gun: Maverick, it seems like the sequel took three decades not out of laze or indifference, but because they needed filmmaking to catch up.
While the larger narrative of the 2022 sequel plays it safe, functioning more as a near beat-for-beat remake of the original than anything new, there’s a subtextual meaning beneath its surface that makes it such an interesting piece of modern American art. On the surface, it’s a movie about flying jets and how cool they look, yes, but beneath that it seems to be a movie about Tom Cruise coming face-to-face with his mortality and how the legacy of his feature films will be what he leaves behind.
