How does the saying go… “some things get better with age”? Please add Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell and whatever airplane he is riding to the list of those things. It’s taken nearly 40 years, but Cruise’s “Maverick” is back in the big-screen cockpit, flying just as fast and just as hard as ever, but now carrying decades-more baggage. It is undeniable that TG:M’s action is faster and smarter than the first film; but what pushes this film from fun to fantastic is its depth, which its parent film had very little of. Director Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion… another Cruise film) and Cruise have injected the new Top Gun with a surprising amount of heart. Sure, there’s still some cheese ball in it, but the film’s creators have allowed an older, wiser, sadder Maverick to bring a new soul to the action, and the combo makes for the blockbuster of the summer and maybe next summer too; it’s really that good.
The opening scene of the movie signals us that some things have not changed with “Maverick” in those 40 years as he pushes an experimental jet beyond its mach-10 speed limit to prove a point to the unimpressed brass. The less than glorious result of his stunt puts him in trouble with his commanding officers, a position, we discover, that Maverick has found himself in often since his Top Gun days. Maverick is still the super-skilled stick jockey, but his career seems to have run out of do-overs. In what might be his last chance, Maverick is assigned to return to Top Gun to train (and train only) a crack group of pilots (Top Gun winners themselves) for a near impossible mission to disarm a nuclear threat.
Thus, the stage is set for our weathered but remarkably young-looking hero. He now must solve the puzzle of the mission; convince his commanding officers that his plan can work; and unify his trainees and select the best of them to execute the mission. Maverick’s solution to the combat Rubik’s Cube seems impossible and the training for and final execution of it yields the most incredible and tense flight combat scenes on film. Mingled with this joy ride are several surprisingly warmhearted and intense moments between Maverick and his team, including his old partner “Goose’s” orphaned son “Rooster”; and a genuinely touching dialog between Cruise’s “Maverick” and his old rival turned protector Val Kilmer’s “Iceman”
Although certainly fresh, TG:M is not without flaw. Early scenes introducing us to the Top Gun trainees harken back to the silliness and sophmorism of the first film with the incredibly good-looking trainees posturing and strutting about like rutting bucks, calling each other by their very-cool flight names and snickering at each other through pretty faces with strong jaws and cleft chins. Worse, maybe, is a mid-movie, just-skins-no-shirts (except the one female Top Gun pilot) beach football game staged by Maverick to build teamwork, raising the question whether all top Navy pilots spend 40-hours a week in the weight room with their personal trainers, and several more hours in the tanning salons—none of them, by the way, looked like they really knew what to do with a football. These minor missteps are easily outweighed, however, by the rest of the film and the strength of the rest of the film is all about Tom Cruise. When Cruise is on the Top Gun screen the film cooks, when he is not, it doesn’t. Fortunately for us all, he is on the screen a lot.
It’s a guarantee that the incredibly well-crafted combat acrobatics will thrill… but, in the end, it is this new, old Maverick and his time-informed perspective that gives TG:M the more powerful story that the first film lacked. Maverick once was the cocky daredevil that sacrificed the whole for the one—him. Now real-combat experience, pain, and loss have colored his view and his aim. Along with the thrills and spills, the film reaches to capture that new struggle and those emotions of the old warrior, the pain of leaving people behind to do a dangerous thing, the heartache of responsibility for others and the fear of making a mistake… the same mistake. And the result is good, very good. It is rare that a sequel so clearly out does its predecessor. Top Gun: Maverick does it in spades. 8.5 out of 10.
Postscript: Having been raised by a fighter pilot and combat veteran of two wars makes Top Gun and other such films especially intriguing to me… emotional for me. Although my father did not fly the generation fighters that we see in Top Gun, I still get some feeling of what he and others like him experienced (just a super small glimpse) in dangerous times. I also thought that maybe Col. Joe Lambert might look more like a Top Gun pilot than Tom Cruise… you be the judge… who’s the real Maverick?
