Top Gun: Maverick
PARAMOUNTAn undeniable fact about Tom Cruise, no matter how one may feel about his personal life, is that he’s a rare breed of movie star in today’s day and age. With the long awaited sequel, Top Gun: Maverick – delayed from its 2020 release – Cruise continues his quest of delivering blockbusters of a different caliber.
Top Gun: Maverick picks up over 30 years after the first film, with Pete “Maverick” Mitchell still a captain so he can continue flying. After attempting a mach 10 flight and pissing of an admiral (Ed Harris), he’s sent back to the Top Gun academy at the request of Iceman (Val Kilmer), to help train a class of the best pilots from the school to do a covert mission. One of the pilots, Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, is the son of Mavericks late copilot Goose, and a source of conflict for Maverick.
Directed by Joseph Kosinski – no stranger to directing decades-in-the-making sequels – delivers a career best film with Top Gun: Maverick. Kosinski, along with Cruise serving in his producer role, and original Top Gun producer Jerry Bruckheimer, opted for the film to be as practical as possible. The need for practicality is a part of Tom Cruise’s strong insistence on the audience seeing the actor in the action – an insistence that has led him to scale the worlds tallest building, hang off the side of a plane taking off, and performing a high altitude skydive. This belief in the audience seeing the actors led to one of Maverick’s strongest qualities: aerial sequences. A sequence late in the film has a discharged Maverick going on a unauthorised flight to prove the mission can be done as he says. This sequence has an almost meta quality to it – a quality that permeates many of the characters’ actions in the film – given the fact Cruise had the actors train to become pilots before going through fighter pilot training. With specialised cameras in the cockpits, the cast had to learn be their own camera operators while up in the air. Though none of the actors are flying the planes, they are still fully strapped in them, which gives many of the film’s moments like the training sequences or taking off from the carrier ship a more visceral quality than most films around today, especially when experienced on the big screen. That experience is accompanied by a immersive sound design that brings out the intensity of the jets while still having room for Hans Zimmer’s guitar rift heavy score that also uses Harold Faltermeyer’s original score. Though still a legacy sequel, Maverick manages to surpass most of these nostalgia driven films, even when playing by the template of them – or the template of the original film – thanks to a script that understands the need for balancing the inherent nostalgia of these projects and still trying to be something that can stand on its own.
One quality dating back to the original film is the archetype Cruise always plays; the confident hotshot who may have missteps but always manages to accomplish his goals. The difference to Cruise continuing to play varying versions of the same character compared to the likes of Ryan Reynolds or The Rock is the way stories – and actors – treat the characters, giving Cruise’s characters enough room to be more than near carbon copies of each other. Though he is the face of the film, it’s the supporting cast that keep the film as entertaining as its marquee star. Stars like Jon Hamm, Ed Harris, Bashir Salahuddin, Charles Parnell and Val Kilmer all deliver strong supporting performances, but its Jennifer Connelly who really stands out with a strong turn as Maverick’s on and off again girlfriend. Despite the big names, it’s the younger cast of pilots who really steal much of the show and leave an impression. Glen Powell fully embraces being Hangman, the straight-out-of-the-80s cocky antagonist to the group. But it’s Monica Barbaro as Phoenix, the sole woman in the group, and one of the few women in the film, who outshines much of the younger cast and brings a distinct presence to her character. While not the strongest of the cast, Miles Teller’s turn as Rooster and the added history with Maverick’s character help give the film a heart and one of it’s best character arcs.
With Tom Cruise being Tom Cruise, a strong supporting cast, and some of the most visceral action scenes in some time, Top Gun: Maverick delivers one of the best legacy sequels and a classic Bruckheimer summer blockbuster best experienced on the big screen.
