The Hollywood star stars in the franchise, 35 years after the premiere of the original film
“To do my job,” reflects Ben Stiller, as Tom Crooze, Tom Cruise’s stunt double, in a video made for the 2000 MTV Movie Awards, “I have to ask myself: who is Tom Cruise? Why is he? Tom Cruise? ” It is a complicated reasoning.
On screen, Cruise is unmistakably our biggest movie star, as a reporter on The New York Times Nicole Sperling explained recently: The latest true exponent of a centuries-old studio system that has been eroded by the growing forces of franchise cinema and streaming. His powerful charisma and reckless acrobatic work combined once again in his latest hit, Top Gun: Mavericksurpassing the one billion dollar threshold at the box office.
Offscreen, Cruise is elusive. He is the frequent spokesperson for an enigmatic and controversial religion that seems harder to understand the more he talks about it. He is intensely secretive about the details of his private life. Even when he makes the occasional effort to look like a normal guy, he ends up sounding like an AI robot. when the magazine moviebill asked him to describe his most memorable movie experience, Cruise couldn’t remember any of it. (“I love movies,” he said, without further ado). When asked which team he was cheering for in a Giants vs Dodgers game he saw last fall, Cruise replied, “I’m a baseball fan.”
Sometimes it is difficult to reconcile these disparate faces. So it’s worth thinking about the question: who is Tom Cruise? Much of its early success in the 1980s and 1990s was based on a certain banal charm. Cruise’s young man and troublemaker risky businessthe sweet and naive Cruise da cocktailthe tenacious and morally correct Cruise from “Jerry Maguire” – each was confident in his ability to convincingly embody the common American, the likeable heartthrob that audiences might want or cheer for.
Around the turn of the century, he complicated this image by appearing in more challenging and less accessible films like Eyes tightly closed And Magnolia. Authors such as Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson helped show Cruise as a serious actor, capable of delivering subtle and nuanced performances.
He then moved away from romance, drama and independent art films. Over the past decade, Cruise has taken an even firmer grip on the action-adventure genre, perfecting the summer blockbuster genre. Performances of him tend to emphasize her easygoing charisma and powerful physicality in him, but Cruise still brings a touch of the same delicate charm of his dramatic career to these roles. You can see it all in the lighthearted, naturalistic chemistry he shares with Jennifer Connelly Nonconformist and the grueling intensity it brought through the last two sequences of Mission Impossible.
You won’t see Cruise limp. The feeling is that you treat every film he makes these days as if it’s the most important he has ever made. The results of that effort seem almost miraculous. How could anyone imagine it Top Gun: Mavericka sequel to a 35-year-old action film with a rather indifferent critical reputation, not only was it far superior to the original film, but also one of the best action films of recent years?
But then read about Cruise’s stubborn insistence on keeping everything as real as possible – requiring a minimum of computer-generated effects, forcing himself to grueling flight training, encouraging his colleagues to resist gravity’s pull to literally puke. . Some of Cruise’s opposing stars over the years have characterized her obsession with him as extreme to the point of seeming cinematic despotism – and it’s true that it would probably be much easier and cheaper to do it all in front of a green backdrop. But this isn’t Cruise. When it comes to these things, it goes to the limit.
But Cruise’s devotion to movies runs deeper, if possible. It’s a devotion to movies with a capital F. While top talent flocks deep streamers with ambitions to go big, Cruise remains adamant not to make movies for companies like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, refusing to negotiate the possibility of a video on demand debut for Nonconformist at the beginning of the pandemic. (“I make movies for the big screen,” he explained).
His interest in preserving the traditional cinematic experience shines through on the colossal scale of the productions themselves, so when Cruise hangs over you in the immense dimensions of the Imax, it feels as big as the movie. It’s a reminder that much of what we watch is adapted to the streaming era: a mass of “content” designed to play just as well on mobile as it does on the big screen. For those of us who are still deeply interested in film and fear for his future, Cruise’s efforts seem invaluable.
Cruise has all the qualities you want in a movie star and none of the qualities you expect from a human being. As a presence on the screen, he is singular; as a person, he is inscrutable. But it was his inscrutability that allowed him to achieve a kind of pristine, enlightened superstar that exists almost entirely in movies, untainted by worldly concerns.
Star Cruise shines like all of his contemporaries and far more than anyone else who has come since, in part because he continues to put more and more into his work and shows less and less of himself everywhere. Who is he? You have to see the movies to find out. / TRANSLATION OF RENATO PRELORENTZOU
Source: Terra
Emily Jhon is a product and service reviewer at Gossipify, known for her honest evaluations and thorough analysis. With a background in marketing and consumer research, she offers valuable insights to readers. She has been writing for Gossipify for several years and has a degree in Marketing and Consumer Research from the University of Oxford.
