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. 

 

Edge of Tomorrow, Snowpiercer, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

So far I've seen 3 new dystopian films in as many months, and surprisingly, I enjoyed them all.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014). I heard this movie described as a cross between Starship Troopers, Saving Private Ryan, and Groundhog Day (!). I might not have gone to see it if Groundhog Day was not in the equation; I love that movie and the concept of continuously reliving the same day with the option of doing something different each time, which is not often explored in films. That's exactly what Tom Cruise does in this, and he's teamed along with Emily Blunt; the two make a great pairing. I went to see the movie on the weekend of June 6, the 70th Anniversary of the Normandy landings. To my surprise, the film starts off with solders battling huge bug-like creatures on a beach (!). I couldn't help but wonder why I was was watching this and not The Longest Day (the next day I did watch that film). The film got better as it progressed, and turned into a very good action thriller, feeling like a "video game" (Live. Die. Repeat.) 

Snowpiercer (2013).  After the entire earth freezes over, only a few human survivors exist, and they're all trapped on a train that circles in a continuous loop. This was a big hit in South Korea last year, but elsewhere, it has been slow to pick up steam (pun very much intended). The film features an international cast: Chris Evans, Jaime Bell, Tilda Swindon, Octavia Spencer, and several South Korean actors that spoke mostly in their native tongue. Did I mention the film also has John Hurt and Ed Harris? (Two of my favorite actors) The film explores class struggle as characters from the back of the train (the slum) attempt to make their way to the front. The journey is an exciting one, as each boxcar presents some new obstacle or revelation about the train's operations. In one scene a man realizes he is in the possession of the last cigarette left in the world; I loved how the camera focused on the smoking ash so intensely.  In another scene a character gets to feel how cold the temperature really is outside (and the results are not pretty).  And one character serves as the train's "photographer" using some coal (I think) and a sketch pad.

Read another blog post about Snowpiercer from Avvaganda.com

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014). Not having a vested interested in the series, I almost skipped this. But it's been getting rave reviews for its innovative visual effects, and I just had to see for myself what all the fuss was about. Well, I must say, I was amazed by the CGI and all of the ape effects. For awhile I even thought I could smell the apes (it turned out what I was really smelling was the foot odor from the kids in the row behind me). The movie had a great story, too, exploring themes of war and diplomacy. Thankfully, I didn't need to see any of the previous movies to understand what was happening, and it was a fun movie to watch. I walked out of the movie feeling I really experienced some innovative visual effects.