The original Top Gun is a divisive film. Depending on who you ask, Tony Scott’s action classic is a superficial tale of exaggerated chauvinism or a time-defining military metaphor. Regardless of which camp you end up in, though, it’s hard to question the film’s lasting impact on both Western cinema and American culture in general (lest we forget the $357 million it earned at the box office, a amount of over $900 million in today’s money).
Paramount Pictures started ideas for a sequel more than a decade ago, though plans were reportedly hampered by Scott’s untimely death in 2012. Fortunately, producer Jerry Bruckheimer swore he and lead actor Tom Cruise “wouldn’t stop” until a new Top. Gun project saw the light of day and the confirmed involvement of Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski in 2017 finally got the ball rolling for those long-cherished ambitions.
The result, several pandemic-induced delays later, is Top Gun: Maverick, a blockbuster follow-up that exceeds expectations.
Raise the bet
As for the plot, the film picks up some 30 years after the events of Scott’s original, with Cruise’s hotshot pilot, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, working as a daring test pilot for what might as well be NASA’s military equivalent.
Ordered by former rival and best friend Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer), Maverick is forced to return to TOPGUN, the United States Navy’s premier fighter-pilot school, to train a group of elite graduates for a seemingly impossible task. mission. Among the talented recruits is Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s late copilot “Goose”, with whom Maverick has a frosty relationship (though not for the reason you might think).
If that synopsis sounds like a thinly veiled iteration of the original movie’s story, you wouldn’t be far wrong – and make no mistake, there are plenty of callbacks here. Teller’s Rooster has all the character traits of his father (down to the mustache and drunken piano playing), while Glen Powell’s Hangman is a gifted jock in the Iceman form. The film’s intro sequence is almost a copy of its predecessor’s equivalent, while even the entrance to Maverick’s classroom as a TOPGUN instructor imitates that of Charlie McGillis’ Charlie.
But aside from these superficial similarities—all of which, it must be said, are deliberate and enjoyable references—Top Gun: Maverick tells a much more mature story. For starters, it’s not just about pride, it’s about survival. The mission in question has tasked the recruits with destroying a real uranium depot guarded by surface-to-air missile launchers and a fleet of high-quality enemy aircraft. To conduct a Death Star-esque bombing raid on the facility, the young pilots must fly through a narrow valley at both dangerously low altitudes and gravity-defying speed.
In Top Gun: Maverick, failure is fatal. Gone are the old-fashioned orange haze, camp sensibilities and overfamiliarity with Berlin’s corny ballad (seriously, Take My Breath Away falls at least six times in Scott’s original), elements replaced by moments of genuine emotional resonance that give depth to characters old and new. Unsurprisingly, Maverick himself is the biggest beneficiary of the film’s refreshing maturity, and audiences unmoved by his exploits three decades earlier may walk away surprised by how much they come to care for him a second time.
There’s a really brilliant comedy here too. Cruise is the funniest he’s been since Tropic Thunder, while Powell’s Hangman scores gold as the film’s impossibly hilarious bastard. For the romantics among us, Maverick’s relationship with love interest Penny (Jennifer Connelly) is an endearing one, and the film’s shirtless beach scene — one of its more obvious callbacks — adds some stylized machismo to the mix.
However, it’s Top Gun: Maverick’s first major aerial scene that reminds viewers why this sequel even exists.
Good morning, aviators
Once Maverick, Rooster, Hangman and his party take to the skies for one of the first dogfights in the film, it quickly becomes apparent that Top Gun: Maverick is a very different beast from the Top Gun of the 80s.
Renowned aerobatic pilot, Art Scholl, performed most of the cockpit stunts in Scott’s original film — in Kosinski’s sequel, the actors on the ground are the same as those pulling 7Gs at 40,000 feet. Once the adrenaline junkie, Cruise put his co-stars through grueling training to ensure that Top Gun: Maverick’s aerial shots looked as real as possible on screen (Powell, among others, vomited frequently during flight) and the results are nothing short of remarkable.
The F-18 fighter jets from the film slice through the air like knives through butter, diving and diving with breathtaking precision to Lorne Balfe’s usually magnificent score. In today’s CGI era of filmmaking, it’s a cliché to describe a movie as edge-of-your-seat action, but Top Gun: Maverick deserves more credit than most. There’s just nothing else like it.
For much of the 130-minute runtime, it’s easy to feel like you’re up there with Maverick and the other pilots traveling at speeds close to 1,000 mph. Director Kosinski and his cinematographer, Claudio Miranda, deserve all the credit for putting these sequences together, but the actors also do well to deliver a convincing performance in such unique circumstances.
Top Gun: Maverick’s ambitions in the air culminate in an outstanding third act that, despite nearly invading James Bond territory, is among the most exciting in recent memory – one particular finale stunt caused audible stuttering from several spectators in our display – but those who are concerned about predictability need not fear. The film’s trailers don’t do justice to the technical wizardry on display here, and other action filmmakers would be wise to learn from Cruise’s passion for the practical.
our verdict
Is Top Gun: Maverick a picture perfect? It sure is hard to find holes in an experience that is so thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish. Sure, some of the flashback sequences are a little too direct, and one particular texting scene — in which Maverick interacts with “Ice” — might have been better left on the cutting floor, but neither qualm warrants more than a passing mention.
In just over two hours, Cruise, Bruckheimer and Kosinski manage to deliver a film that both pays tribute to the legacy of Top Gun and breaks new ground for modern filmmaking. Like the 1986 classic, Top Gun: Maverick demands to be seen on the largest screen possible and serves as a timely reminder of what movies can still accomplish in the age of streaming.
Top Gun: Maverick hits theaters exclusively on May 25 and May 27 in the UK and US respectively.
