For the week of May 18th, Paramount Home Media Distribution is offering 4K upgrades of three Tom Cruise favorites: Top Gun, Days of Thunder, and War of the Worlds. If 1983's Risky Business gave Tom Cruise his first great performance, then Top Gun, released three years later, did something better: it made him a star. At no point do you confuse hotshot fighter pilot Pete "Maverick" Mitchell with a real human being. He's more an accretion of signifiers - cocky swagger, impudent bravado, daring courage - the kind of guy who'll buzz a radio tower just to piss off a superior officer or lead a whole bar in an impromptu Righteous Brothers sing-a-long so a girl will notice him. This would be a problem were it not for two safeguards that Top Gun provides. 1) Cruise's pumped-out confidence is the stuff of great unintentional comedy. Every so often, the film tries to let Maverick be "normal," and I'd liken the experience to watching an alien try to mimic human behavior. Vide his first big date with Kelly McGillis' flight instructor (how he brusquely asks to take a shower), or the profoundly unsexy sex scene the two share, or - best of all! - the robotically homoerotic volleyball games he plays with his co-pilot Goose (Anthony Edwards, giving the film's best performance) and his rival Iceman (Val Kilmer, giving the film's most self-aware performance). And 2) director Tony Scott gives Maverick's surfaces such polish and beauty that they transcend their glib charms and become iconic. Cruise is better than human here. He's a legend. Top Gun announced Cruise as such a major box-office draw that you can't blame Scott and him for essentially trotting out the same story a second time. 1990's Days of Thunder might take place in the world of NASCAR racers, but it's really just a Top Gun redux. Cruise's Cole Trickle is the same headstrong madman as Maverick, with a nicer-than-he-looks frenemy (Michael Rooker) and a tough-but-fair mentor (Robert Duvall) helping to convince the world that Trickle is as great as he already thinks he is. Hell, Cruise has the same anti-charisma with his on-screen love interest here, which amuses me to no end considering that this is ostensibly the film where he met and fell in love with Nicole Kidman. All of which makes Steven Spielberg's 2005 sci-fi epic War of the Worlds all the more interesting. Yes, Cruise holds court at the center of another blockbuster adventure, this time trying to protect his kids (Justin Chatwin and a great Dakota Fanning) from an alien invasion. But Spielberg is working in a register that's as bleak as Munich or Schindler's List. The action scenes are vivid, horrifying; Spielberg uses 9/11-inspired imagery to convey the aliens' merciless savagery. And Cruise tries to turn his own iconography against himself. He comports himself with the same shallow enthusiasm, only now he comes off like an immature manchild who's bungling his relationship with his children. His struggle is less against the aliens than it is against himself. We go to the movies to watch people like Tom Cruise assemble and demolish their images.
Speaking of images: if you saw the previews for Paramount's Sonic the Hedgehog about a year ago, you likely found yourself aghast at the CGI visage of the title character. It seemed as though Paramount and director Jeff Fowler had taken this iconic Sega Genesis hero and rendered him as some waking nightmare. Take Sonic, merge him with a wet raccoon, and then pull his facial features tightly across a too-sharp skeleton and human teeth. The look provoked understandable rancor, and in an almost unprecedented decision, the studio delayed the film for an extra three months just to make Sonic less repulsive. To their credit, they succeeded. The revised Sonic (voiced by Parks and Recreation's Ben Schwartz) looks like a 3D version of the video-game sprite, all soft lines and rounded corners, and whatever post-production crunch Fowler subjected his digital animators to doesn't impact the quality of the technical performance: it's a fully integrated, seamless effect. (You can see the new Sonic in the trailer below.) It's a shame, then, that no one - not Fowler, not Paramount, not screenwriters Pat Casey and Josh Miller (or the board-room full of comics who no doubt worked on the legion of ADR-ed or off-camera punch-up jokes) - spent as much time on the film itself, which is just...there. It exists. You can watch it. But now that Sonic is no longer horrifying, it almost lacks any sort of individual stamp. Even the game mechanics feel sanded away. Yes, Sonic runs fast, but at the five-minute mark, we abandon the impossible loops and verdant forests of his jungle planet in favor of Montana (really Vancouver, and the same Vancouver forests that housed the Twilight series and most of the X-Men movies), and all so Sonic can play mismatched partners to James Marsden's bored small-town cop. That's what Sonic fans were clamoring for, I'm sure - to see their video game turned into Midnight Run, but for kids. Still, I said that Sonic "almost" lacks any purpose for being. If you decide to watch this - and the jury's out - you should do so exclusively for Jim Carrey, who delivers a tour-de-force comic turn as Dr. Robotnik. It matters not one whit that the movie removes away his character's video-game origins (he's now a covert government scientist working for the Pentagon, or something). Carrey is so manically, feverishly inventive that you get a kick watching him pull focus with an avalanche of bizarre non sequiturs and weirdo physical/verbal affectations. You get these blissful, sudden jolts of Fire Marshall Bill, of Ace Ventura - you could even say he's finally found a way to make his Riddler villain work. Even though this Robotnik lacks the girth of the video-game iteration, Carrey's persona is so outsized that he always seems like the biggest thing in any scene. Tommy Lee Jones might disagree, but I can definitely sanction Carrey's buffoonery here. I just wished the surrounding movie followed his example.
From Warner Home Entertainment comes Gavin O'Connor's The Way Back. You could be forgiven for thinking that this sports drama has nothing new to offer. It almost plays like Hoosiers if you combined Gene Hackman and Dennis Hopper's characters. Ben Affleck stars as a former high-school basketball phenom who, after years of self-harm and addiction, gets a shot at redemption after his old alma mater hires him to coach their flailing basketball team. True to form, the team can't catch a break before Affleck's unconventional mentor starts preaching the value of training and responsibility, and it all ends in a Big Game. But if you're familiar with O'Connor's previous sports entertainments Miracle and Warrior, then you know he's quick to leaven cliché and treacle with understated realism. The small-town community in The Way Back (San Pedro, California) has a grit that's rawer than we might expect, and O'Connor keeps cutting away from moments where other sports movies would linger; during the basketball scenes, he'll often freeze the film right when we're getting invested and flash the final score. It's like he knows we've seen this stuff before, so there's no reason to stick around when we could be focused on the more important stuff. And chief among that is Affleck's tremendous lead performance. I've said this many times: whether we're talking about this, Good Will Hunting, Gone Girl, or last year's underrated actioner Triple Frontier, Affleck is at his best when he's playing a boozy piece of crap who's painfully aware of his own inadequacies. Most movie stars, we like watching for their ideal versions, but with Affleck, we like watching his public persona go through hell. And he's never seemed more emotionally open than he does in The Way Back. For an alcoholism drama, we don't get many movie-ready histrionics. The closest we get is when he accidentally lets himself into the wrong house during a particularly bad bender, and O'Connor largely plays that beat for sad comedy. No, Affleck leans into the quiet indignities of addiction: the ways he's always got a drink on hand for much of the movie, or the unpracticed grace with which his character drinks (like how fluidly he's learned to crack a beer during his daily shower). In moments like these, Affleck doesn't seem like he's acting - he's simply existing on camera. Even the big game surprises us because of how O'Connor and screenwriter Brad Inglesby choose to frame it. By that point, they've made it clear that the greatest battles we fight are always the ones we wage against ourselves.
Finally, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing Autumn DeWilde's Emma to Blu-ray. As with the Greta Gerwig Little Women, you would be wholly justified in asking - sight unseen! - whether or not the world needed another adaptation of Jane Austen's classic 1815 novel. Not only have we gotten period-appropriate iterations (the Kate Beckinsale version; the Gwyneth Paltrow version), but you also could argue that Amy Heckerling's '90s update Clueless remains the definitive version of the story. Yet like the new Little Women, DeWilde succeeds in making this oft-told tale feel fresh and vibrant. In part, she brings a dry brutality that's far more reminiscent of Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favourite. Yes, the film takes place in 1800s England, but DeWilde and her DP Christopher Blauvelt frame this world at a remove, favoring master shots and slightly-wider-than-normal angles. Everything looks distorted and ridiculous, and so the film feels all the more cutting in its visual presentation of the quietly leering Elton (Josh O'Connor) or the sweetly ridiculous Miss Bates (Miranda Hart). Emma the movie is making fun of them, which is fitting, given that Emma the character is also mildly-to-majorly dismissive of almost everyone she meets. And that venom provides an excellent showcase for the great Anya Taylor-Joy, who never seems more comfortable than when she's plotting the future - or demise - of someone she considers beneath her. This version is far less enamored with her meddling than previous adaptations are; we watch her try to play matchmaker with Mia Goth's kind, decent Harriet, and we're not sure Emma isn't going to destroy the poor girl in the process. It's why DeWilde and Taylor-Joy are able to craft comic setpieces that stick in your throat, or why it's so satisfying when Emma spars with George Knightley, the one person who sees through her and - as played by Johnny Flynn - possesses this anachronistic charm that's more James Dean than it is Colin Firth. You'd have to be a little out of time to match the title character. A really nice surprise.