When I first saw the trailer for Top Gun: Maverick I put the film on my Wait For Video list.
When I first saw the trailer for Jurassic World: Dominion I put the film on my Must See in Theater list.
Top Gun zoomed into theaters in May 2022 soaring to the top of the box office like its predecessor back in 1986.
It was a hit with both critics and fans. It’s September and people are still going to see it in theaters.
Deacon Steve wrote this summing up how a lot of folks feel about the movie.
Top Gun: Maverick is more than a nostalgia sequel or legacyquel; it is almost more than a movie. It is a manifesto and a monument, a defiant time capsule and a swaggering IMAX spectacle without precedent or peer. People will say they don’t make movies like it anymore, although they never did, and never could, and never would have, if not for the obsessive drive and visionary determination of Hollywood’s last action star.
Top Gun: Maverick (2022) – Decent Films
When JWD came out it preceded to make money just like all its other siblings did.
The combo of the cast from the original film with the cast from the newer films proved a winning combo for audiences.
Unfortunately the critic’s didn’t feel the same love as the audience and JWD became the worst reviewed movie in the JP franchise.
For a while it seems Dominion wants to be the franchise’s Mission: Impossible. Instead, it’s the anti–Top Gun: Maverick.
The achievement of this summer’s extraordinary Tom Cruise legacyquel includes projecting the characters, themes, and trajectories of the original Top Gun more than three decades into the future, gracefully revisiting nearly everything fans loved about the 1986 blockbuster while also shrewdly patching up its issues and improving on it at every turn. Jurassic World Dominion can’t even manage to carry on the themes and trajectories of its immediate predecessor, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, let alone any of the prior Jurassic films. Maverick almost makes Top Gun a better movie retroactively. Jurassic World Dominion can’t touch the Jurassic Park trilogy, but, capping the Jurassic World trilogy, it makes its two predecessors retroactively worse.
Jurassic World Dominion ( ) – Decent Films
Based on the reviews TGM was something I was now considering seeing in the theater. JWD was now something I was considering seeing on my TV.
Going to the theater is hard for me as I work all week and then at the end of the day I’m tired and I need to go home and spend time with my wife. Kristin doesn’t like to go to the movies as much as I do and doesn’t like a lot of the movies I want to see. She’s also not going to write a blog article about it like I am. Besides writing a review requires energy to think, punder, and recall details, energy that I don’t always possess due to many factors I have just mentioned plus not getting enough sleep.
Regardless of the difficulties I got my chance to sneak out and see TGM one sunday afternoon while she was at her 3rd order Discalced Carmelite meeting. I was considering seeing Thor: Love and Thunder instead, but the rave reviews of TGM convinced me that it was the better choice. While Kristin was praying with her community of Carmelites I was the only person in the theater watching Tom Cruise fly at freighting speeds in his fighter jet.
Based on the reviews of JWD, I decided that spending the energy and time to see it in the theater was just not worth it for a movie I would probably end up hating. So I waited till recently to watch it on my TV at home. I signed up for Peacock Premium not only so I could watch the JWD extended addition but also watch the highly rated Resident Alien TV show from the Sci Fi channel. After watching the pilot episode I’m interested in seeing more. Kristin has to watch another episode before deciding if it is worth watching the whole series or not. Another movie streaming on Peacock P is Downton Abbey: A New Era Movie. She really loved Downton Abby the series so seeing I made her watch JWD, it’s only fair we watch that.
After listening to all the hype for TGM and the hype against JWD I have come to the conclusion that…
Top Gun 2 was kinna meh and not as legendary as people made it out to be.
Jurassic World 3 (or Jurassic Park 6) was actually pretty good and not as horrendous as people made it out to be.
I didn’t hate TGM, it just didn’t make me glee with enthusiastic cinematic excitement. I like Tom Cruise in several movies
-Mission Impossible Movies 4 +
-Oblivion
-Edge of Tommorow
Nothing about TGM stood out to me as extraordinary story or film making. There were too many closeups, which I hate in a film. The plane sequences were visually overwhelming with lots of shots of people in cockpits. I thought they could have done a better job of focusing in on more pilots and the overall plot of the film resembled the ending of the original Star Wars. This is explained in the Honest Trailer above. Also Tom Cruise wasn’t running away from dinosaurs and Chris Pratt wasn’t one of the pilots. Come to think of it, I didn’t see that much running from Tom in general. He usually does that in movies. Dinos, running and Chris Pratt would have added something to the film. I did like the relationship with Maverick and Goose’s son and also with Iceman. Having a nifty navy nickname is pretty cool.
I didn’t love JWD, I liked it and thought it was overall a fun film and a good addition to the series. It did have Chris Pratt and people running away from dinosaurs. I could also see Tom in a high speed chase on a motorcycle against assassin Atrociraptors. I could see Tom racing a Pterodactyl or a Quetzalcoatlus in his jet. On a side note, I could see Jason Statham playing his character from The Meg punching a T-Rex and knocking it down. Chris or Tom just couldn’t do that.
You know what movie crossover is realistically possible?
F9 director Justin Lin won’t rule out the idea of a crossover between the Fast & Furious movies and the Jurassic Park/World franchise. Because the Fast & Furious and Jurassic Park/World films are based at Universal Studios, a crossover is theoretically more plausible than it would’ve been, had the pair been set up at separate studios. A Fast & Furious/Jurassic Park Crossover Is Apparently Possible (cbr.com)
JWD also had cliched action scenes, a predictable plot and things we have seen before like the main villain getting his just deserts by a dino he is trying to make money off of. The movie has its flaws and I think the original Jurassic Park movie is the only one truly a gem in terms of cinematic storytelling. But still the charm of seeing the original cast with the new cast and the clone girl running away from dinos is still worth the price of viewing. It also has a cute baby raptor. Awww. The ending and the beginning of the film was golden as it focused on dinos in the wider real world interacting with us. The Mosasaurus swimming with humpback whales. The Triceratops marching with elephants in Africa. Parasaurolophus racing with wild horses in the west. And an Allosaurus eating a poor guy on his scooter in the Madrid City square. Sure they could have and probably should have focused more on this instead of the evil corporation plot , but this is what we got and perhaps they will make something like that in the future. Till then we got this…
Top Gun: Maverick isn’t the worst movie I’ve seen, but I didn’t think it was all that great.
Jurassic World: Dominion isn’t the best movie I’ve seen, but I didn’t think it was all that bad.
While I can usually rely on reviews to give me an approximate idea of whether I will or will not like something, seeing it for yourself is the only real way of knowing.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In