Top Gun (1986), Heartbreak Ridge (1986), and the latest Top Gun

Last weekend I watched two military-themed movies, Heartbreak Ridge and Top Gun, both from 1986. Both have similar parallels and deal with senior officers training younger fighters. In Heartbreak Ridge, Clint Eastwood is a marine about to retire but gets put in charge of training some new recruits including Mario Van Peeples, whose character is really interesting; he's a musician and loves to sing and perform in bars and occasionally gets in trouble or thrown in jail for reckless behavior. Eastwood's character is pretty reckless, too and the two form an unlikely relationship. I'd like to have seen a whole movie about Mario Van Peeples's character, similar to how the "Maverick" character is portrayed as the focus of Top Gun. But it was an okay movie; one needs to keep remembering that it is a movie set and made in the 1980s. One bizarre scene involves the marines trying to make a long-distance phone call with a credit card. 

The two Top Gun movies are pretty similar to the Eastwood movie, I feel. In the first movie, the focus is not on the senior officer but of course Tom Cruise's character and friends. For whatever reason, I never saw this movie before last week.... but as I was watching, I was paying close attention to some of the details because I knew there'd be some callbacks in the sequel. The movie was good had some good flying sequences.

Then I saw the sequel, which came out last weekend, and I liked it better than the first. It had some typical Hollywood cliches, but I didn't mind them because I was basically looking for mindless escapism and fun and so I didn't criticize the film too heavily. The sequel is a bit more like Heartbreak Ridge because the "older" Cruise character is now the senior officer on the verge of retiring and faced with training some young hotshots. And I liked that the Val Kilmer character got promoted to admiral, but Cruise never advanced that far. And it was nice to see a diverse group of fighter pilots. And I liked the pairing of Cruise and Jennifer Connelly who is a bar owner and has becomes the love interest. Their scenes were really good and reminded me of Eastwood's and Marsha Mason's in Heartbreak Ridge a little bit, especially the ending.