And I think all helped TG:M become the absolute monster of a film that it is (despite your objections tif)
Nah, my objections are very unique to me. For whatever reason, I just can't do the 'suspend disbelief' thing with Top Gun (and I'm guessing w TG:M, still haven't seen it), so stupid things like Maverick being 100 years old with 40+ years active duty and still an O-6 on flight status (
a test pilot! no less); or in the first one
USS Ranger is in the western Pacific to start the movie but is visible in port at North Island in the background of some of the San Diego scenes only to be back WestPac for the climax, or that they're taking a fleet crew offline during a deployment to send them to school; make me roll my eyes so very hard. I'm overly critical.
It's just these movies, of course. I don't mind there being sound in space battles in sci-fi movies, or question how Jennifer Tilly 'wins' her divorce case in "Liar, Liar" despite doing so by proving she was underage when she wed and thus not legally married in the first place (I don't know if a common law situation would've arisen, but the movie is silent on either topic relying on the power of Tilly's cleavage to win the day). But Top Gun, noooooooooooooooope. Can't abide any of it. And it's super extra frustrating because they do a very credible job at getting a lot of small details right. The 'Linda Blair' turning your head around to keep visual contact, no other air combat movie has ever done that as well; or how they steal the jet at the end of the new movie, which is actually pretty accurate to how crews would get one of those things up and running when they were on a cross-country ferry mission and had to do a stopover at a civilian airfield and had no ground support (the behind enemy lines aspect notwithstanding, I've seen multiple ex Aviators say this was actually shockingly realistic, down to correct instrument crosschecks, which is very much lol).