THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF TOM CRUISE’S MASSIVE TALENT
Top Gun: Maverick pays tribute to the actor but not to the spirit of the original
WE LOVE TOP GUN. We love it so much, we can quote just about any line of dialogue from start to finish. But love, like any other passion, is double edged. It means that any follow-up that bears the name has incredibly high hurdles to clear. Top Gun: Maverick clears many of these hurdles with ease: Are there gripping aerial combat scenes which show pilots flying by the seat of their pants? Yes. Does it feature that iconic introduction complete with those unmistakable anthems? Yes. (Plural because Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone is as much an anthem as Harold Faltermeyer’s Top Gun, alright.) So what happened?
Top Gun: Maverick is, well, all about Maverick. It’s in the title and if you plot Tom Cruise’s inevitable rise to super stardom, you can trace it all the way back to his role as Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. Let’s first talk about what the inaugural movie did great: It was a popcorn movie, it doesn’t deal with exposition. It was a “sports movie” (pilots competing for Top Gun trophy ‒ which does not exist in real life) wrapped in the trappings of high-octane aerial combat. So it had the basic elements of tension: rivalry between pilots; frownedupon romance between instructor/pilot and of course, best buddy Goose, whose ultimate demise gave the titular character a challenge that his sheer skill with a F14 Tomcat could not readily overcome. These elements are missing from Top Gun: Maverick.
Produced by Tom Cruise, starring Tom Cruise and about Tom Cruise, Top Gun: Maverick creaks under the unbearable weight of Cruise’s massive talent. In behind-thescenes movie featurette, Top Gun: Maverick reveals that Cruise flew a jet himself for the movie, one-upping everything he has ever done since Mission Impossible; and because he is so invested in this, the ensemble cast of Top Gun graduate pilots is just foils for him and him alone. The original Top Gun was about Maverick, a lone wolf adapting to team dynamics and so you got to learn about Iceman and Slider at the very least ‒ even you felt for Hollywood and Wolfman when they were shot down. You were genuinely invested in their survival, which made dogfighting scenes gripping.
In Top Gun: Maverick, the ensemble of pilots is nothing more than caricatures. You have Glen Powell’s Hangman, this movie’s Iceman facsimile (who incidentally never gets selected for the final mission). And of course, it’s the 21st century and there are female fighter pilots now, so you have Monica Barbaro’s Phoenix; but we never really get to understand why she’s been selected for the mission aside from the fact that she pilots the two-seater reconnaissance F/A-18D, which allows her to have a RIO (Rear Instrument Officer) “Goose-type” character in the guise of Lewis Pullman’s Bob (his callsign not his name by the way). That said, the movie does nothing with it other than have them have a “bird strike” flat-spin situation where no one dies.
We don’t even get to know their first or last names; heck, we still remember Tom “Iceman” Kazansky and we continue to remember it because he has become an Admiral in the decades since he shot down a MiG-28; this means that by the time we get to this new generation of Top Gun pilots’ “crisis situation”, we don’t care for anyone in it save Maverick.
Furthermore, as they’re graduates, we don’t even have a gauge for their skill levels relative to one another since they’re not competing for the trophy but rather engaging in a series of “Death Star trench runs to hit a small 2-metre target”. (Really, this is not hyperbole. The target really is two metres wide and they have to fly between canyon walls.) More egregiously so, the Top Gun pilots engage in aerial combat and training without a backing soundtrack equal to Cheap Trick’s Mighty Wings.
Who’s that moustached dude we see playing piano in the trailer? Well, his callsign is Rooster; no guesses for what song he is playing on those ivory keys and whose son he is. So if there’s any emotional tension, it’s between Maverick and Rooster forced. What made Top Gun work was that Maverick ultimately learns his lesson: He can’t no longer be just a talented loner, it has already cost him his best friend and he has to learn how to play supportive Wingman using lessons imparted by Viper, and in the course of the mission, evolves into a bona fide combat leader and mentor.
In Top Gun: Maverick, we learn that he’s no longer a Top Gun instructor and still hung up about Goose (he died 30 years ago, dude). So, the director/script writer engineers a fairly convoluted plot to have him posted from his job as an experimental pilot back to the Navy Fighter Weapons school, this time no longer in Miramar but Nevada, cue fan service music ‒ you know the one and cue, motorcycle scene, you also know which one.
What Top Gun: Maverick does amazingly well
Aerial combat. Really. When Tom Cruise says the film is a tribute to aviation, he’s not joking. We see all manner of F/A18 hornets in single- and double-seat configurations do all sorts of close quarter acrobatics. It’s just as you see in the trailers, the fighter jets are barely two metres apart and the reason for this is because cinematically, a more authentic engagement will see the audience starring at dots and shapes on the horizon.
In Top Gun: Maverick, they’re so up close and right above the canopy, we even get to see exactly where the flares that trick heat seeking missiles are launched from and for F14 nuts, that analog bullet counter in the cockpit which counts down the rounds left in Maverick’s 20mm M61 Vulcan Gatling cannon. We even get to see “aggressor painted” fifth-generation F22 Raptors playing enemy bogeys from the un-stated nation engaging our Top Gun pilots in dogfighting.
The F22 is the first U.S. supermanoeuvrable aircraft with thrust vectoring and it’s incredible watching it outclass F18s and eventually the Maverick’s own hijacked F14 ‒ but once again, it’s Maverick’s show, he gets all the kills and does everything and saves everyone except for one final scene involving Hangman. Thankfully, we don’t get a “you can be my wingman anytime” moment on the flight deck which saved us from flinging our popcorn at the Lido IMAX screen and risking a fine for littering.
The enemy this time, is an unknown country which so happens to still operate F14 Tomcats (in the real world, Iran is the only other country outside of the U.S. that has them) so that the director/script writer can have a fairly convoluted plot device to put Maverick and Rooster together in the same jet fighter and to impossibly recreate Anthony Edwards and Cruise’s chemistry.
Ultimately, Top Gun: Maverick succeeds as a thematic successor of the original. However, it doesn’t quite convey the spirit and camaraderie that made 1986’s Top Gun so infinitely quotable. No one will be leaving the theatre telling you to “stop writing cheques your body can’t cash” or warn you about busting you down to “flying rubber dog s--t out of Hong Kong”. There will not be pilots giving you an equally quotable “feel for a need for speed”, nor will you even remember the soundtrack after you leave the theatre.
Everything great about this movie comes fortunately (or unfortunately) from the original 1986 film’s most iconic moments. That said, it is a fitting tribute to how incredibly well Tom Cruise and his iconic smile has aged. On his motorcycle with the wind in his hair, he looks just as he was from the ’80s.
Top Gun: Maverick is now showing in theatres