Top Gun: Maverick

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B+

              Top Gun: Maverick may be the best sequel I’ve ever seen to a movie that I don’t like. It may be heresy for somebody my age (born in the 80s) to say this, but I find the original Top Gun to be a plotless, meandering bore and I admittedly groaned with indifference whenever I saw the Maverick trailer start playing (and I saw the trailer for this an obnoxious number of times since its original release date was in 2020). But I am happy to report that, for possibly the first time, my cynicism was unwarranted. Top Gun: Maverick is a joyous throwback to old-school blockbusters, before super heroes took complete control of the multiplex and CGI replaced stuntwork and characters.

               The film begins by immediately reuniting us with Maverick (played by Tom Cruise, in case you somehow don’t know that) as he gets in trouble for piloting an unauthorized test-run of a hypersonic jet. His old buddy Iceman (Val Kilmer) saves him from getting kicked out of the Navy entirely and instead assigns him to return to Top Gun and train a group of young pilots to execute a nearly impossible mission to destroy a nuclear facility. Among those pilots is Rooster (played by Miles Teller), the son of the first film’s Goose, who blames Maverick for his father’s death. The rest of the film is, a couple of diversions aside, about Maverick training the crew for the suicide mission that bears a striking resemblance to the assault on the Death Star in A New Hope.

               That plot may not be much, but it’s a hell of a lot more than the first film gave us. The original Top Gun is basically just a few guys dicking around and hitting on their hot instructor for 90 minutes before the writers finally realized that they needed to pull some sort of conflict out of their ass in the last fifteen minutes. This film establishes the mission and the stakes early on and the running time becomes a countdown clock as the mission draws near. It ain’t much, but I’ll take it over the original.

               The minimalist plot largely works because the writing and characters are surprisingly strong. The 1986 Maverick was a brash, cocky asshole and I frankly couldn’t have cared less about him. He is still a cocky fuck here, sure, but this is one of the more layered performances that Cruise has given in years, perhaps in his entire career. This Maverick is a dude that has seen some shit and you can see that grit on his face. The know-it-all smile is still there, but it is always accompanied by a hint of regret. It’s the look of a man that has confidence but knows that his best years are behind him. It’s an oddly subtle performance for such a massive movie and it brings much more emotional weight to the character. By the end of the movie, I was legitimately pulling for this dude to make it out of this alive and I never thought that I could care about this character. That is impressive.

               The supporting characters are all also memorable, unique and oddly likeable. Miles Teller gets the spotlight as Rooster, but Phoenix, Hangman, Fanboy and (my favorite) Bob are all a lot of fun and the movie takes time to give each of them their own personalities and moments for them to shine. They feel like real people and a real team and, unlike the first movie, I can even remember their names without looking it up. The moments between Maverick and Rooster are also surprisingly poignant, establishing a real sense of drama and tension between the two that feels more authentic than one would expect from a big-budget sequel in 2022.

The young characters get most of the fun, but the surprising emotional depth comes from the older characters. The film’s saddest moment is the brief reunion between Cruise and Kilmer (who has cancer in real life), which feels like two old friends meeting for what they know is likely the last time. It’s an odd moment when you begin to forget about Maverick and Iceman and, for a moment, feel like you are watching Cruise and Kilmer legitimately say goodbye to each other. Hell, even the romantic subplot works, thanks largely to the casting of the always fantastic Jennifer Connelly. Connelly has one of the most fascinating filmographies in Hollywood, largely ignoring big-budget blockbusters (except for Hulk) in favor of smaller, more interesting films. I always assumed that this was a conscious choice, as her talent and head-turning beauty could have made her a much bigger star, and I had thought that her casting in this movie was beneath her. While her part here still lacks the depth of her usual roles, she still makes the love-interest character far more interesting than it has any right to be, or would be in the hands of a lesser actress.

              But this is Top Gun and you’re not here to learn about the characters or hear me swoon over Jennifer Connelly. At the end of the day, this is an action movie and goddamn does it deliver. The jet fights are the best and most exciting effects sequences that I’ve seen in a long time. They also feel real because, unlike most modern blockbusters, they largely are real. Incredible effort went into filming these things, renting real jets and fighter pilots from the Navy and filming the actors in the back seats of the cockpits. The actors had to operate the cameras and essentially direct themselves while travelling at incredible speeds, an idea that seems too insane to work. Somehow, against all filmmaking conventions and general common sense, it does work, resulting in truly immersive action scenes. While most modern big-budget movies are just two people in front of a green screen reacting to things that will be added later in post-production, Top Gun: Maverick proves that doing things for real, even at insane cost and difficulty, is the better choice and it feels like a throwback to a time when ingenuity was valued over software.

              A surprisingly good as it is, it isn’t a perfect movie, though. Although the plot is improved, this is just as oddly vague as the original when it comes to the villains. Assumedly because the producers were concerned about international box office, the film makes sure that the villains are never identified in any way, never even taking off their helmets or having a flag decal on their jets, leaving us with a vague threat and villains with zero personality. It’s also unclear why the U.S. military, which has the most advanced air force in the world, has jets that are so vastly inferior to these unidentified villains.

              The film also has an odd relationship with nostalgia at a couple of points. On one hand, it recreates the (in)famous volleyball scene from the original, complete with many oddly-lingering shots of sweaty, shirtless men. Although the sport is changed to football and the film (unlike the original) offers an explanation for why its happening, it still feels like a nostalgia-fueled moment that halts the film’s momentum. On the other hand, the film is oddly dismissive of the original’s iconic soundtrack. Danger Zone is only played at the beginning of the movie and I was shocked that it didn’t appear again during the climactic mission. I was even more shocked that Take My Breath Away doesn’t appear in the movie at all, being replaced during the end credits for a song that Lady Gaga did for the movie. I personally would have taken the original soundtrack over the homoerotic beach scene, but that’s just me. The two women sitting in front of me really seemed to like the beach scene, so I guess it serves a purpose.

              Top Gun: Maverick is the right way to do a legacy sequel. It isn’t just a pointless retread of the first movie (like Ghostbusters: Afterlife or The Matrix Resurrections) and it isn’t just a series of recreated moments from other movies (like Spiderman: No Way Home). I’m not even a fan of the first movie, so I have no nostalgia for it. Rather, this made me nostalgic for old-school blockbusters, before movies always had some ridiculous agenda to shove down your throat and before computers removed the sense of awe from special effects. Top Gun Maverick is just a fun popcorn movie without a cynical bone in its body. See it on the biggest screen possible and party like it’s 1986.

Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gun%3A_Maverick#/media/File:Top_Gun_Maverick_Poster.jpg