Top Gun: Maverick and Star Wars

Never in my life have I been taken out of a movie more than with the Princess Leia space scene from The Last Jedi. I was fully aware of the feeling of movie theatre seat against my body. And because I couldn’t be further from invested in the actual movie, more and more tiny details started to bother me. This escalated until literally every tiny thing that happened in this movie just felt like the worst thing ever. And don’t worry, I’m not going to just list things I don’t like about The Last Jedi. But I do wanna talk about this specific shot.

There’s this one shot where the camera flies from outside in space to inside the main Rebel ship. The shot I'm thinking of happens at the 01:49:48 mark, but there might be another example that I'm forgetting. While this is a cool and dynamic shot, it actually hurts my immersion a bit because it’s too impressive. Let me explain.

Y’all see Top Gun: Maverick? Of course you did. So, surprise surprise, one of the things that makes this movie cool is its use of real planes, real stunts, and a real billionaire trying to kill himself on camera. One of the ways that this is so immersive and effective is that the camera is always placed in a way that is apparent and believable. You have two main types of shots. Shots where the camera is inside the cockpit, and shots of the outside of planes, probably shot by another plane or maybe a helicopter.

Oh and also, there’s some shots that are clearly cameras mounted on the outside of a plane. Three types of shots!

But you’re never wondering how these shots were made, which works in the movie’s favour, giving it a pseudo documentary feel. You’re thinking, “I can’t believe tom cruise is really flying this plane!"

There is also this one shot where we do see Cruise from outside of the plane, but it still feels completely plausible that it could be real. This very well might be just a shot of Tom Cruise flying a plane from the outside of the plane.

You might have noticed that Tom Gun: Maverick borrowed a few small plot details from another movie called Star Wars. Which, if you're going to steal from a fighter jet movie, you might as well steal from the best. But the plot is not the only thing borrowed from Star Wars. The same type of shots that make Top Cruise: Maverick so immersive are used in the original Star Wars. We really only see two types of shots in the trench run sequence; Shots from within the cockpit and shots from the outside of the ships.

We never see the camera move in or out of the cock pit. We never even see any of the pilots from the outside of their ships. The shots from outside are pretty dynamic, and not really meant to feel super realistic. However, you could theoretically strap a camera to the outside of a spaceship and get those shots.

Obviously, there is a bunch of VFX and completely impossible things happening in this sequence, but because it’s filmed in a way that is theoretically possible if it were real, it increases the sense of immersion. This isn’t by accident either. When designing the dog fighting stuff, the filmmakers used footage from WWII era movies as reference, and even designed the space ships with influence from real aircraft. These sequences are specifically designed to feel like real fighter jet footage.

So when Last Jedi does a shot so dynamic it would be impossible to film, even if these made up spaceships were real, it strangely breaks my immersion, even though it is a good looking shot. The VFX are even arguably more impressive than the original Star Wars, yet it feels more artificial because it is more ambitious. Despite being set in space, A New Hope still feels somewhat grounded, because it uses the exact same type of cinematography that makes Tom Maverick: Cruise Control so immersive.