Luca Guadagnino believes ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ is a “really bad movie” and hits out at cinema’s “economy of nostalgia”
Acclaimed director Luca Guadagnino has appeared to ruffle some feathers after admitting that he is very much not a fan of Top Gun: Maverick.
The film, which arrived in 2022 after delays owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, was not only a critics’ favourite but a box office smash, becoming one of the biggest films in Tom Cruise’s arsenal of Hollywood epics.
However, despite this, it’s clear that not everybody was destined to be a fan, as Guadagnino held nothing back during an event at Il Foglio’s Innovation Festival earlier this week, during which he opened up on his thoughts about the current movie market.
Describing Top Gun: Maverick as a “really bad movie”, he claimed that it failed to deliver on what audiences want out of a modern film experience these days.
Speaking about this with reference to Disclosure Day, the latest Steven Spielberg sci-fi movie being released in cinemas, the Call Me By Your Name director said: “[Disclosure Day] is part of the economy of nostalgia, which is one of the fundamental themes of the last 20 years, right?”
The director elaborated, “The whole imagination is built, even politics, on nostalgia and therefore how to move inside ourselves what we think we’ve lost and find it again.”
“I remember when I was making Challengers, I went to see Top Gun: Maverick in a packed theatre,”Guadagnino continued, before saying it was a “really bad movie, but at the same time it was a movie that reproduced, let’s say, with today’s ideology but with the forms of the time, the legendary Tony Scott film with Tom Cruise, people were screaming, throwing popcorn, applauding, they were very happy.”
Ultimately, Guadagnino said this was a sign of the times in which the movie-goers “were very happy because the economy of nostalgia seems to be the only commodity that can be dominated by all types of market.”
Indeed, for his own part, the filmmaker does seem to be focused on blazing into the future with his current projects, coming off the back of the 2025 thriller After the Hunt starring Julia Roberts, and with his next movie, Artificial, set for release next year.
That movie is set to star Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the course of his controversial firing and re-hiring in 2023, in which, somewhat ironically, he will feature opposite Top Gun: Maverick alum Monica Barbaro.
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