Pardon the portmanteau, but the “legacyquel” Top Gun: Maverick has no business being as good as it is. The first film’s success made sense. Directed with kinetic vision by Tony Scott, Top Gun (1986) made Cruise a bona fide star as the Luke Skywalker fighter pilot of not-so-long-ago in a galaxy, well, here. It was a Cold War smash, and the Pentagon-sponsored hit saw Navy recruitment increase by 500 percent. Jump ahead 36 years and America is war-weary, and fighter pilots are quickly becoming relics of the past, but one thing that hasn’t changed is how exciting they still are on the big screen.
As the title suggests, Cruise is back as Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a flyboy with jet fuel in his veins who refuses to rise up the ranks if it means taking him out of the cockpit and putting him behind a desk. When Maverick is called upon to return to Fighter Weapons School, a.k.a. Top Gun, to prepare the 12 best Navy pilots for an impossible mission that is akin to a real-life version of the Death Star gauntlet, past issues resurface.
One of those issues involves Miles Teller’s character “Rooster,” the son of Maverick’s wingman from the first film, Goose. While the film never takes this dynamic in any unexpected directions, it mines the tension and emotion between the two for all it’s worth. Likewise, there is a rekindled love interest. Not Kelly McGillis from the original, but a welcome Jennifer Connelly, the proprietor of a local pilot bar who had history with Maverick somewhere in the interim between the two films. Lastly, Val Kilmer returns, in what capacity his throat cancer allows, as Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazansky in an emotional if brief reunion. The film also tackles the theme of aging and obsolescence, a topic that feels ironic for Tom Cruise to convey so convincingly, seeing as how he’s managed to avoid both.
Nearly everything else about Top Gun: Maverick is a familiar throwback to the original, from the iconic theme music and “Highway to the Danger Zone” playing over the opening credits (opening credits themselves being a nod to a bygone era), to the topless beach sports montage; from the clichéd-in-all-the-right-ways plot, to the rip-roaring fighter jet sequences filmed, actually filmed, using real jets, real people, and real speed. If there is any green screen or CGI in this film (and no doubt there is) it is used to an absolute minimum.
And that’s kind of the main reason, maybe the only reason, to see Top Gun: Maverick. That the film works on multiple levels is a mere bonus on top of the take-your-breath-away skyjinx (sorry, another portmanteau). Director Joseph Kosinski, the writers, Cruise, and the rest of the crew went above and beyond to make an emotional and exciting movie that for better or worse makes it feel like little has changed since the ’80s.
