Quentin Tarantino praises Top Gun Maverick for best cinematic spectacle

Count Quentin Tarantino among the millions of moviegoers who have fallen in love with Top Gun: Maverick this summer season. The director stopped by the ReelBlend podcast this week and had nothing but crushes to share about the Tom Cruise sequel.

“I fucking love Top Gun: Maverick. I thought it was fantastic,” Tarantino said. “I saw it in the cinema. This and [Steven] Spielberg’s West Side Story both offered true cinematic spectacle, the kind I almost thought I wouldn’t see again. It was fantastic.”

Tarantino has long been an outspoken admirer of Tony Scott, who directed Cruise on the original Top Gun. Scott also directed True Romance, based on Tarantino’s screenplay. The director passed away in 2012. According to Tarantino, the Top Gun sequel came as close to a Tony Scott film as moviegoers will ever get now that the director is no longer with us.

“There was just this lovely, lovely aspect, because I love Tony Scott’s cinema so much and I love Tony so much that we’re so close to seeing another Tony Scott movie,” Tarantino said. “[Director Joseph Kosinski] did a great job. Tony’s respect and love was in every frame. It was in almost every decision. It was deliberately right there, but in this really cool way, that was really respectful. And I think it was Tom in every decision [Cruise] made on the film.”

Tarantino reiterated, “This is the closest we’re ever going to see another Tony Scott movie, and it was a bloody great one.”

One minor gripe Tarantino had with the film was that the emotional reunion scene between Cruise and Val Kilmer was “almost too cheap.” But the director added: “But it absolutely works. It’s a bit like Charlie Chaplin dying onstage for the last scene of “Limelight”… but it fucking works. You wait for it and the damn scene delivers.”

Elsewhere on the ReelBlend podcast, Tarantino called Spielberg’s “Jaws” the “greatest movie of all time.”

“Maybe not the best movie. But it’s the best film ever made,” said the director. “And then there are other films that can get into its rarefied air. But as far as a movie goes, there’s nothing quite like Jaws. There is no “better” than “Jaws”. It’s the best film ever made. And it shows how badly timed most films made before Jaws were.”

Top Gun: Maverick is still in theaters nationwide. The film grossed $653 million at the US box office, plus $1.3 billion worldwide.