The less heralded chipmunk team is back with a tree-climbing vengeance!
Genre: Animation/Family
Premise: Years after the acting duo have split up, Chip and Dale are given a new mission when a friend of theirs mysterious disappears.
About: A lot of people had no idea this movie was even coming down the pipe so imagine their surprise when it not only popped up on Disney Plus, but quickly became the number one movie on the service! Writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand also wrote Disney’s “Magic Camp” and “Doolittle.” The film is being heralded for its unending number of “holy schnikees” cameos.
Writers: Dan Gregor and Doug Mand
Details: 1 hour and 47 minutes
When I heard there was going to be a new Chip n Dale movie I was a little skeptical, with emphasis on the “little” (get it? Cause they’re chipmunks). Those 1980s cartoons with that wacky mini-mammal combo managed to cook up a smorgasbord of shenanigans each and every weekend to the point where I didn’t think anything could top it.
I still remember my favorite tale of them all, season 3, episode 19, “Chips Ahoy?” where Chip n Dale wake up in a cheese factory with amnesia and have to figure out how they got there then fight their way out against an army of rats. Unofficially, that storyline is what inspired Robert Ludlum to write The Bourne Identity.
Now, as we all know, Chip n Dale was famously canceled by controversial TV executive Charles K. Figueroa after he became head of ABC and, in a power move, got rid of all the Saturday morning cartoons on the channel. The creators were so angry about the cancellation that they funded their own episode, titled, “Two Chips and A Miss,” airing it on public TV, which became an instant classic, winning the Clemson Award for best animated episode of television.
While we’re talking about great episodes, how can we not mention…
OKAY!
Okay okay okay.
Enough.
Sorry. It was too tempting to mess with you guys. I had to do it. I know why you’re here. You’re here for…
MOVIE REVIEW – TOP GUN: MAVERICK!!!
Genre: Action/Drama
Premise: Legendary pilot Pete Mitchell is tasked with preparing a new team of Top Gun recruits to pull off a near-impossible mission, a team that includes the son of the man he killed, Goose.
About: They say the movie star is dead. Then how is it that a movie star whose latest movie is built solely around his stardom just made 150 million dollars at the box office, more than double Tom Cruise’s previous movie high? This seems even crazier when you consider that a year ago, Paramount didn’t know what to do with Top Gun: Maverick, as they’d been sitting on a completed film for ages, everyone around them sending their films straight to streaming, and people were questioning whether the theatrical experience was done for anybody outside of Marvel. But Tom Cruise stayed the course, convincing Paramount that this thing was meant to be played in theaters, and boy was he right. This has to be one of the most shocking box office takes in history.
Writers: Story by Peter Craig & Justin Marks. Screenplay by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie. Characters by Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr.
Details: 130 minutes
Quick question for the readers. Is this the best long-absence sequel of all time? Usually, these long-absence sequels crash and burn in a fiery blaze of non-glory. Matrix Revolutions, Terminator Dark Fate, Dumb and Dumber Too, Independence Day: Resurgence, T2: Trainspotting, Bad Boys For Life.
Somehow, some way, Top Gun Maverick discovered the formula for coming up with a long-absence sequel story that needed to be told. Remember how I was talking about that in the newsletter? From the second Top Gun Maverick started, with Pete continuing to bump up against his never-ending flaw – his recklessness – you felt like this movie mattered.
With that said, I do think Top Gun Maverick missed a couple of opportunities to elevate this to genius (yes, I said it) status. But even with those near-misses, it’s still the blockbuster movie of the year, leaving all these superhero flicks in the dust.
Full disclosure. The first Top Gun did nothing for me at the time. What I remember about it was the roundhouse high-five, which I practiced way too much with my friends. Then the line, “I feel the need. The need for speed.” I loved saying that line. But other than those two things, Top Gun went right through one eyeball and out the other. I barely remembered anything about it.
So I watched it again in preparation for Top Gun: Maverick and I was shocked by how invested I was. There’s this weird thing with movies where they either work or they don’t work. And you know it within the first five minutes. It just feels like all cylinders are firing. Even movies you don’t personally enjoy, you know if they still “work” as a movie.
The original Top Gun had that feeling. It was so sure of itself. And that made us sure of it. When Goose dies? I was freaking emotional, man. I was like, “whoa, did I not have feelings as a kid? How was I not crying up an ocean when this happened?”
In many ways, Top Gun is the perfect summer movie. It celebrates everything we want out of a summer. We have a girlfriend who lives in a house by the ocean. We play shirtless beach volleyball every day. We drunkenly belt out songs with our buddies at the bar. And wherever we go, we have a light coat of sweat covering us. That movie felt like summer is supposed to feel.
Top Gun: Maverick understands this as well. Which is why it’s debuting on the opening weekend of summer.
If you haven’t seen it, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell test-flies super advanced planes for the military but is told that these programs are shutting down as the military is moving towards drone technology. Luckily, Maverick is called back to the Top Gun flight school to train a bunch of new recruits. Top Gun flight school, by the way, is the school that trains the best of the best.
One of the new recruits is “Rooster,” which is Goose’s son. Naturally, there’s a lot of friction between Maverick and Rooster, as many believe Maverick’s reckless flying style is what led to Goose’s death.
The school turns out to be more important than your average flight school as there’s a uranium rich target from an enemy (they don’t tell us who the enemy is but we assume it’s the Russians) that needs to be taken out within three weeks. Maverick will be tasked with training the students to pull this mission off. Meanwhile, he falls for an old flame who works at a local bar.
What I loved about this movie is that it understood why the first movie was so successful and embraced it. You have to understand that Top Gun was the pinnacle of the Bruckheimer-Simpson era, where movie producers opened a magazine, looked at the pictures, found something that looked cool and built a story around it. It was a very simplistic way to approach movies, but the good thing about it was that it kept everything simple.
A movie about a best pilot competition at the top flight school is as simple as it gets.
One of the reasons blockbusters feel all over the place these days is because they’ve overcomplicated the storytelling to the point where there’s a million things going on at once. Look no further than Dr. Strange and the Fifteen Other People movie that came out last month. It’s a big cumbersome forest of confusion. I mean do you even remember what the plot was? I don’t.
Top Gun Maverick understands what that does to a movie. It wants you focused instead.
One of the ways they do this is to give us the mission goal right at the start of the film. “We’re going to try and destroy THIS target. And here’s why it’s going to be hard. And that’s why we need to train. Now we’re going to go train.” I actually thought the sequel did it better than the original. If you could nitpick the original, one of the things you’d point out is the low stakes. What happened at the school never felt that important.
The original film rallies at the end by adding a big climax that *does* matter. But we only learn about the mission at the end. Here, we’re told about the big thing they have to do right from the start. So now the training actually seems necessary.
Another way they did a great job was reminding us over and over again how difficult this mission was going to be. They showed us through computer animation just how impossible the job was. This is a great tip for every screenwriter. Tell the reader how impossible it is to succeed at the goal. Really lean into that. Because you want the reader to think, “Oh my God. How are they going to pull this off???”
There’s two major steps in the mission and they even call these steps, “Miracle 1” and “Miracle 2.” So we’re thinking in our heads, “They have to pull off TWO miracles??? Oh my God they’re never going to be able to do that!” Which of course makes us want to watch to see if they can.
I can’t emphasize enough how great of a job the writers (and the director) did at clearly explaining every point of the mission. The reason you do this is so the audience knows exactly what’s going on, which means they’re more engaged.
Once the parameters are clear, you can do things like emphasize how “impossible” it will be to pull the plane up over the enormous slope at the end of the bombing. That way, we’re all anticipating that moment. We’re thinking, oh man, even if they hit their target they still have to shoot up the side of this mountain with no room. That creates anticipation and suspense.
When you’re a newbie writer, you assume the reader and viewer already know those things. So you don’t bother explaining them. Or you barely explain them. Clarity about what your characters have to do is essential to the reader understanding what’s happening. So whether it’s a fighter pilot mission or a bank heist, make sure we know what the characters have to do to achieve their impossible goal.
Another thing I liked was that Maverick’s flaw was the same. Usually sequels suffer because the hero has already overcome their main flaw in the first film. Maverick’s flaw is his recklessness. It’s what got his best friend, Goose, killed. Watching him battle that – does he take it easy or does he continue to push the limits – is what makes his character fun. Top Gun is, arguably, a 2-D movie. So anything you can do to make it a little deeper, helps. And I think Maverick’s flaw of recklessness is what helps this movie feel deeper than it deserves to feel. Which is likely why it resonates with people.
But it’s such a great flaw to play with, regardless, because it’s so visual. Some flaws are hard to show. Like, if your character’s flaw is that he’s an idealist, that doesn’t transfer very well to film. If you have a really talky movie with people sharing ideologies a lot, it could work. But recklessness is this big flashy way to explore a flaw and, for that reason, I’m glad they kept it. We see it right at the beginning – to re-establish that he still has this flaw – when he’s pushing a test plane past its recommended speed (Mach 10), even if it means the plane falling apart.
Let me preface what I’m going to say next with, I think this is a great film. You can nitpick anything. So I don’t have any overwhelming feelings about these missed opportunities. But I do think they could’ve added something to the movie.
First, why didn’t they add a storyline with drones? They tell us right from the start that pilots are going the way of the dinosaur so you think that’s what’s coming – a drone obstacle. But we don’t see a single drone in the movie. I think it would’ve been great if the military was considering going with a drone strike on this target and the flight school was trying to prove that it needed to be a manned mission instead.
I mean how awesome would it have been for Tom Cruise to go up against the newest top level drone being flown by some video game type stud who thinks these old planes are jokes? Seeing Cruise outmaneuver and trick the drone to convince the military to go with them over the drone team would’ve been awesome, in my opinion.
Also, I thought they should’ve done what Cobra Kai did and made all the student pilots a bunch of Gen Z pu$$ies. And Tom Cruise had to knock some old school toughness into them. It would’ve not only been more fun but it would’ve added some personality to the students who were overshadowed heavily by the star power of Cruise. Just a thought.
But other than that, I thought this was the perfect summer movie. It delivered on every level. It actually used its nostalgia for dramatic effect rather than audience applause. It understood exactly what it needed to be and, to use the perfect analogy, it hit the target dead on.
I loved it!
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: An old urgency trick is to give the goal an impossible time frame (in this case, they have 3 weeks to train for an impossible mission), then, in the middle of the story, CUT THE TIME FRAME DOWN EVEN MORE. So, at the midpoint, they think they still have two weeks. But then the military receives intelligence that the uranium is arriving sooner than anticipated. Which means they’ll have to fly the mission in one week.
