This tendency, along with Marvel fatigue, incredible action sequences, and hype that’s atomic even by studio standards, account for the unexpected success of Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick. With too many crises to list here currently affecting our sense of global order, it’s tempting to flock to movies that depend on a misremembrance of the past. And modern culture is currently obsessed with, yes, nostalgia, the very lifeblood of cinema. Which is why it’s always weird when disparate films, produced over differing spans of time with vastly contrasting means, seem to anticipate a cultural mood. An aspiring blockbuster reaches audiences years after its conception, and a barebones indie, usually crowded out of the theaters or even streaming services by tent poles, can take years to land a release or corral the populace’s attention-if it manages to at all. Films are fragments of images and sounds, born from personal obsession and business apparatus alike, that unavoidably reflect the past. Nostalgia has always been a powerful force in cinema.
