[COLUMN] Mayday and the Uncanny 1980s Nostalgia of Streaming Movies | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece opens by discussing the climax of Mayday, a new film streaming on Apple TV. It’s not a great movie. It’s not even a particularly good movie. The best that can be said of it is that it is a smoothly functional movie, which is part of what makes it so interesting. But if you do want to see it completely blind, feel free to bookmark this piece and come back.

There is a moment towards the climax of Mayday as hotshot Navy pilot Troy Kelly (Ryan Reynolds) attempts to land a stolen Soviet commercial jet on an aircraft carrier, that his companion – defecting former KGB operative Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh) – gasps, “It’s like I’m inside my favorite movie.” It’s a moment that is so revealing; not just of Mayday, but of so much of the modern streaming movie boom. It is an invocation of nostalgia within a piece of nostalgia itself.

It is perhaps worth explaining something about Mayday, which released on Apple TV today, but which already feels like an entry in the canon of “movies that don’t exist”, films that make such a minimal impact on the collective consciousness that the mention of their name – and perhaps even a listing of their cast – elicits a quizzical glance. In some cases, from people who have actually watched them. One of the easiest ways to end up as part of this canon is to go direct to streaming.

Mayday is the latest film from writers and directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley. These are two of the most promising directors in contemporary comedy cinema, having directed both Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, two of the best studio comedies of the decade. They are also the creative team working with Skydance and Paramount on the next Star Trek film, a clear attempt to reboot and reinvigorate the franchise for the modern age.

So, Mayday has a clear pedigree behind the scenes. It also has a pretty impressive cast. It stars Ryan Reynolds, whose last theatrically released film – Deadpool & Wolverine – was both the second-highest-grossing film of 2024 and the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time until it was displaced by The Odyssey. Reynolds is something of a big deal. He is a genuine entrepreneur, having owned a gin company, a football team and a cellular network.

Even beyond Reynolds, the film co-stars Kenneth Branagh, who is doing one of those accents that he enjoys so much. Branagh is not necessarily a name to the same extent that Reynolds is, but he is a respected thespian. He was the first person to be nominated in seven individual categories by the Academy Awards. The film also features a solid supporting turn from Maria Bakalova, an actor who received an Oscar nomination for her comedic turn in Borat Subsequent Movie Film.

However, the film itself is decidedly underwhelming. It is, like so many streaming movies, incredibly generic. It is not bad, per se, and in fact includes a couple of pretty decent laugh lines. It just has that familiar slick streaming movie smoothness that means it doesn’t really stick with the audience. This is a feature of streaming movies that has been well-discussed and -dissected. Patrick Willems did an exceptional video on this class of movie that is well worth a watch.

Still, Mayday does crystalize something about a particular class of these streaming movies that feels illuminating. In particular, it underscores that so much of what drives them is a strong sense of nostalgia. In particular, nostalgia for the 1980s. Even more than that, nostalgia for the pop culture of the 1980s. These streaming movies often feel like an attempt to recreate the kind of movies that the people working on and producing them enjoyed during their childhood.

Mayday is, after all, not just set in the 1980s in the midst of the Soviet policy of “glasnost.” It is directly evoking any number of specific films from the era. Troy Kelly is a hotshot Navy pilot, like the characters from Top Gun. This is an unlikely buddy comedy about a goofy American and a no-nonsense Russian teaming up and learning about each other and themselves, like Red Heat. There are even shades of Spies Like Us in the two men trekking through Soviet Russia.

The film is not subtle in its influences. Early in the movie, when Troy goes out drinking with his colleagues, a bouncer greets them as “Top Gun.” When Troy wakes up in Nikolai’s cabin after crashing his spy jet in enemy territory, the first thing that Nikolai wants to share with his guest is a pirated copy of Top Gun, to the point of asked Troy what happened in the movie during the few moments when the man pirating the film went to the bathroom.

Mayday doesn’t just want to evoke these 1980s, it wants to draw the audience’s attention to how it is evoking these 1980s. When Nikolai declares that the climax of Mayday feels like re-experiencing the climax of Top Gun, it is not just a character beat for this veteran Soviet operative. It is a statement of intent from the movie. It is the movie calling its shot, inviting the audience to think of it in the same sentence as Top Gun, to treat it as a simulacrum of that beloved classic blockbuster.

However, Mayday is far from the only streaming movie to feel suffused with this 1980s nostalgia. There are plenty of movies set in the 1980s, like Nahnatchka Khan’s Totally Killer or Matt Palmer’s Fear Street: Prom Queen, many of which feel like attempts to coast off the pop cultural success of Stranger Things. Mayday is certainly and literally set in the 1980s, but its something more fundamental than the setting. It is a general “vibe” of these movies.

For example, Christopher Landon's We Have a Ghost is a clear invocation of 1980s Amblin films, stories of young kids dealing with family issues by connecting with something metaphysical. Guy Ritchie’s Fountain of Youth is set in the present day, but represents a clear attempt to make a modern Indiana Jones movie. Eddie Murphy has cashed in directly by making two streaming legacy sequels to iconic 1980s hits: Coming 2 America and Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.

There is perhaps a broader point to be made in the prevalence of the action comedy within the streaming space. So many of these streaming movies, Mayday included, are incredibly formulaic movies about spies doing cool spy stuff: Seth Gordon's Back in Action, Dexter Fletcher's Ghosted, Simon Cellan Jones's The Family Plan, Thomas Vincent's Role Play, Julian Farino’s The Union and so on. These are all movies about how seemingly normal people are actually secretly cool spies.

These movies are not literally set in the 1980s, but they feel of a piece with many of the action comedies of the era, from Jumpin' Jack Flash to Spies Like Us to Top Secret to Leonard Part 6 to The Trouble With Spies, culminating in James Cameron's True Lies. It was a genre very obviously tied to Cold War anxieties, and turning these spy stories into comedies was perhaps a way of releasing some built-up pressure. Understandably, the genre faded away after the 1980s ended – but they are back.

There is, of course, perhaps a larger cultural context for reawakening Cold War anxieties and, with those fears, some of the cultural markers tied to that era. However, movies like Back in Action and Ghosted don’t feel tied to contemporary concerns about Putin’s Russia in the same way that something like Spies Like Us or Jumpin’ Jack Flash were very specifically anchored in the cultural context of the Cold War. It feels more like the movies are drawn to the aesthetic as nostalgia.

The trend is so prevalent that it is an appreciably large part of Ryan Reynolds’ filmography, particular on streaming. The Adam Project is a film that involves literal time travel, albeit back to 2012, in a plot that evokes 1980s children’s classic The Flight of the Navigator. Spirited is a modern take on A Christmas Carol, that imagines Eberneezer Scrooge (Will Ferrell) as the current Ghost of Christmas Present trying to redeem the soul of media consultant Clint Briggs (Reynolds), evoking Scrooged.

Of course, it is worth acknowledging two qualifiers here. Not all streaming movies are suffused with this nostalgia. Outside of awards-courting films like Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, there are a variety of would-be streaming blockbusters that try to evoke more contemporary filmmaking styles, with films like Project Power and Thunder Force riffing on superhero movies, for example. 6 Underground is a Michael Bay movie, not really an exercise in nostalgia but an expression of his style.

The other is that 1980s nostalgia is obviously a big part of culture outside of streaming. More specifically, it makes sense for Mayday to draw as heavily from Top Gun as it does, given that the film’s legacy sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, was the second-highest grossing movie of 2022. Indeed, one of Apple’s biggest hits – F1 – went to theatres, feeling like more of a spiritual successor to Days of Thunder than the actual upcoming sequel.

However, these movies that exist outside of streaming often feel less overtly nostalgic. Maverick is a sequel to Top Gun, but it is also about Tom Cruise’s place in the modern cinematic landscape. F1 is very directly channeling those 1980s sports movies, but it is also a film – like a lot of Joseph Kosinski’s films – about human beings trapped in larger systems and structures. The nostalgia of these projects doesn’t feel quite as all-encompassing as it does in The Adam Project or Mayday.

What is so jarring about the nostalgia of these projects is the uncanniness of them. These are films that clearly seek to evoke the feeling of the 1980s, but they cannot because it is no longer the 1980s. There is something very disconcerting in watching a film trying to recreate the texture of Tony Scott’s Top Gun, but shot on crisp and perfectly rendered digital. It feels strange to watch Fountain of Youth try to replicate the globe-trotting sensibility of Indiana Jones using green screens.

This is not a criticism of modern techniques. It is possible to make great movies using digital cinematography. Computer-generated effects can be breathtaking. However, it’s the use of these modern techniques to try to replicate an aesthetic fundamentally tied to a different mode of production that makes these movies feel so unconvincing. They are too clean and too slick. They look like a digitally-rendered reconstruction of the memory of the era rather than the era itself.

This is reflected in some of the plotting and writing as well. Many of those 1980s blockbusters had jagged edges to them, both in terms of being a little nasty but also in terms of being more loosely plotted. These modern recreations are much more focus-group tested and designed to specification. These films feel more formulaic in their characters, their beats, their rhythms. They feel more programmatic, more engineered than the films that they seek to emulate.

There is also just a vague lack of discernment and taste in crashing these elements together. Mayday is a great example of this. Reynolds is positioned as a 1980s comedy star like Bill Murray or Chevy Chase – he’s snarky, he’s wry, he’s arrogant. However, Top Gun worked as well as it did because it was designed around an action star rather than a comedian. So trying to fit a “Chevy Chase type” into a movie designed for Tom Cruise feels like it misunderstands the appeal of the film it is emulating.

The results are weird, because they are often recognizably evocative of the films that they are clearly trying to replicate, even without characters explicitly telling the audience how much the movie should remind them of Top Gun. However, they are also imperfect recreations that lack any of the specificity or detail that made those originals so resonant in the first place. It is impossible to imagine any audience member who wants to watch Top Gun deciding to rewatch Mayday instead.

This may be why these films lack any real stickiness, whether culturally or personally. They are designed in such a way that they are reminders of earlier better films, and so the memory of them often feels supplanted by the memory of the films that they are clumsily and unconvincingly copying. These films feel less like being inside one’s favorite movie than it is being trapped inside a clumsily reconstructed memory of one.