Review: Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

In case you haven’t heard, Top Gun: Maverick is the greatest movie ever made. Or, at the least, such is the adoration that has greeted this long-in-the-making sequel to the seminal 1986 action film/US Navy recruitment vehicle. I have no intention of raining on the parade, although the praise is a tad hyperbolic. It’s not the greatest film ever made, nor is it the best action movie of the year (Michael Bay would like a word). But it is a rousing piece of entertainment, one that is able to satisfy its audience with the complexity of its craft and the simplicity of its storytelling. 

In some ways, it’s a throwback, relying on movie tropes and storytelling styles that are very much of-the-time of its predecessor. But it’s also state-of-the-art, using the latest in movie-making technology to capture some of the best aerial combat footage ever produced. It’s old, but it’s new. It’s a throwback, but state-of-the-art. It’s a contradiction, in a sense: a franchise movie that makes us remember what is so special and appealing about non-franchise blockbuster entertainment. Whatever it is, it’s damn fun.

The film’s main appeal is the action. In the film, Tom Cruise’s Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell has to return to Top Gun to train the best and brightest pilots of the past few years to carry out a secret bombing mission on an enemy’s nuclear facility (as in the original film, the enemy is never named). Most of the film consists of the group’s aerial training, with Maverick engaging the younger pilots in aerial dogfights and pushing them to complete a training course simulating the trench flying and bombing run of their eventual mission (their mission is essentially the Death Star trench run from A New Hope). It’s all planes, all the time, and frequently startling, especially in IMAX, where the floor-to-ceiling screen overwhelms you with its size and the blistering precision of the film’s vehicular machinery.

Director Joseph Kosinski, taking over for the late Tony Scott, might lack Scott’s impressionistic editing rhythms and romantic visual style, but he’s a competent technician with an eye for large-scale imagery. Here, he straps IMAX cameras to the cockpits of real F/A-18Fs, so we can watch the real actors fly the planes at impressive speeds. Kosinski doesn’t cut much during takeoff and landing sequences in order to make clear the reality of what he’s doing. For instance, when Cruise’s Maverick takes off from an aircraft carrier, the frame drops and lifts along with him in one seamless take, the weight of movement of the objects on screen making clear that Cruise truly is flying the plane.

The realism of the larger-than-life action has become a hallmark of Tom Cruise’s career in recent years, and here he pushes the fidelity to greater heights, forcing his younger co-stars—including Miles Teller as Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, son of Maverick’s best friend, “Goose,” from the original film—to withstand the same high Gs and aerial stunts that he does. At moments, the film delights in showing these young stars straining under the weight of gravity and close to fainting from the pressures of filming, all while Cruise flies around with a grin on his face, loving the death rush of filming in such intense conditions.

The film’s storytelling is relatively elegant in our modern age of blockbusters that favour lore and extratextual references. To be sure, there are references to the original. The opening moments of the film recreate the opening of the original, with the same iconic musical cues of Harold Faltameyer’s score and Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” starting things off with a wave of nostalgia. There are dramatic moments reflecting on the death of Goose in the first film and how it continues to haunt Maverick, as well as a moving appearance by Val Kilmer as a cancer-stricken “Iceman,” who has been robbed of his voice (much as the real Kilmer has been as a result of throat cancer).

The story pits Maverick against a coterie of admirals and military lifers (Jon Hamm, Ed Harris, among others) who think he’s a relic and no longer needed with the rise of drone technology. Of course, we watch as Maverick proves them wrong again and again through sheer force of will. Maverick is a character who stands apart—the name is no accident. He stubbornly acts as an isolated hero who can rise to the occasion, orders and due process be damned. He’s the incarnation of American individualism, or “the living manifestation of destiny,” to borrow a phrase that Alec Baldwin calls Cruise’s Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. The film is about the tension between the group and the individual, the demands of the many and the will of the one. And like all good Hollywood stories, it sides with the individual in the end, putting us through a familiar, yet effective, narrative with plenty of tension and obstacles, but the necessary happy ending that stands as a power fantasy for the individual.

The story works, as conventional as it is. It’s a vehicle for the action and the heroism of its central character. Where it is unique from other blockbusters is its reliance on relatively simple formulas of conflict, motivation, and tension. It technically is a franchise film, but it doesn’t approach blockbuster storytelling as an exercise in branding or sowing the seeds of spinoffs and future installments. It’s entirely focused on the entertainment capacity of this individual story, this individual spectacle. It’s earnest and even corny in a way that modern movies are not allowed to be, with melodramatic moments of camaraderie and earnest pleas for emotional investment. But its lack of irony speaks to its enormous capacity to entertain.

That’s also not to say that Top Gun: Maverick is devoid of deeper interests. It’s not what I’d call “a thinking man’s film,” but it does have some intriguing metatextual avenues to explore, mostly through how much the film aligns Maverick the pilot with Tom Cruise the movie star. You can read the film as a metaphor for the industry itself, with Maverick’s incidence on the importance of human pilots and individual-will a stand-in for the tried-and-true formulas of pre-superhero blockbusters. The film insists this is Maverick’s last mission in a way that the film is a kind of last go around for an older type of Hollywood action blockbuster.

The more interesting read is interpreting the film as a metaphor for Cruise himself, the star, the all-American, smiling, big screen hero who plays by his own rules and is uniquely, psychotically, committed to the pleasures of the big screen on his own terms. Cruise will not make streaming movies. He speaks of the movie theatre as a religious space. He’s our last great movie star and as long as he is willing to risk his life, much like Maverick risks his in his plane, the older traditions of Hollywood will live on. Beneath this desire lies the spectre of a death wish, with Cruise’s seemingly-pathological need to risk life and limb for the entertainment of the audience finding its corollary in the early scene of Maverick reaching Mach 10 in an experimental fighter jet, and then pushing beyond Mach 10 simply because he cannot help himself from doing so.

As long as we’ve got Cruise, the old ways of Hollywood spectacle will persist. He’s tied this type of cinema to his own material existence. He will manifest blockbuster entertainment or die trying. Top Gun: Maverick proves that one man can hold back the clock, stave off oblivion, save the day…for now. We should be glad to have him while we do, even if the knowledge that all planes come down eventually, all things fade, lingers in our minds, threatening the end, for Cruise, for Hollywood, for cinema as we know it. But not today.

8 out of 10

Top Gun: Maverick (2022, USA)

Directed by Joseph Kosinski; written by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie, based on a story by Peter Craig and Justin Marks, based on characters created by Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr.; starring Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer.

Related Posts