Is it finally time for us all to admit that Tony Scott’s Top Gun is… a really good movie? I can picture at least half of you forming up behind me, like that astronaut in that one meme, frothing at the bit to say “Always has been” before plugging me with two shots from your pistol, but the other is pleading with me to say the line that’s become standard-issue ever since Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick premiered at Cannes. I won’t say it, though, because Maverick isn’t better than the original 1986 film: Instead, I think it’s just as good, which is to say that it’s fantastic. Maverick doesn’t try to rewrite the formula of the original, though it adds a heaping serving of pathos to the plate of fanciful imagery, white-knuckle thrills, and swell character work already present in the original film. Couple that with the impressive innovations in camera tech both as a result of the natural evolution of modes of film production and the few that were outright invented for this film, and you have something familiar, yet utterly fresh.
But first, a little more about the why of this film. The intangible thing about Top Gun, the piece of the puzzle that links all of the disparate yet oft-heard criticisms together and makes it possible to answer them all with a “Yeah, and?” is that it is cool as fuck. Want to freak the fuck out like Quentin Tarantino did in some now-forgotten ’90s movie about how gay the movie is? Yeah, and? Are you trying to tell me that gay fighter pilots can’t be cool? Are we still at the cultural point where the mere suggestion of queerness in quasi-conservative art is enough to cause otherwise well-meaning progressives to sling homophobic insults? I genuinely hope not. Want to rant about how the whole thing is a military recruitment video and/or propaganda? Yeah, and? Hell, modern cinema itself is founded upon the idea of political entertainment as a mass spectacle, but you don’t see someone tearing Strike! or Battleship Potemkin a new asshole because it was commissioned by the state. Nor is it unfair to compare Scott, a son of Eisenstein, to his master — both are fascinated by the intersection of beauty and montage, and both are innovators in their own right (though, of course, Eisenstein is the more significant). At worst, you can make a comparison to Jiro Horikoshi, the protagonist of Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises, in how aesthetic beauty — the glory of flight, the dream of man ascendant — is perverted by imperial ambition and capital.
That knowledge of how they were used doesn’t change the fact that Horikoshi made beautiful airplanes, nor does it change that Scott made utterly stirring and aesthetic gorgeous entertainment in his all-too-brief time on this Earth. The fact that Kosinski — a talented stylist who spent the first half of his career in search of a compelling script and/or character (which both Tron: Legacy and Oblivion lacked), but who came into his own with the firefighter drama Only the Brave back in 2017 — has made something that Scott would be proud of is nothing short of a miracle, and I hesitate to use the word “miracle,” simply because it elides the amount of hard work and skill it takes to do on his part. No one, save, perhaps, Tom Cruise, needed a sequel to Top Gun. Hell, I’ve made jokes on this very site about that fact, but I now can’t imagine why I ever doubted that a return to the Naval Fighter Weapons School was necessary. But Maverick is the perfect symbiosis of narrative creative force — Cruise, star/producer, and keeper of blockbuster cinema’s flame — and the modern-day artistry needed to make those emotions land while also rocking one out of their luxury recliner chair at the local multiplex.
It’s not particularly novel or controversial to suggest that the whole point of making Maverick was so that Cruise could, as he finally gets close to the AARP membership threshold, start to unpack his legacy, returning to the role that made him a superstar in order to evaluate how he and cinema at large have changed. Unlike most stars of his era, Cruise remains the draw, and despite being the face of several mainstream franchise, he, not the IP, retains top billing. A Mission: Impossible film is, at heart, a Tom Cruise film, and his most cynical dip into those waters, 2017’s The Mummy, is an outlier in a otherwise mostly-traditional career as a movie star. The receipts prove that he’s not a relic — folks still line up to see each M:I installment — but it must be weird for him as he realizes how much the herd has thinned in the last twenty years, as their careers have slowly been consumed by the IP craze and his peers have become more representational icons or avatars for ever-expanding corporate enterprises, slotted in interchangeably and quickly replaced once they’ve served their time or simply outlast the public’s interest. What all of Cruise’s roles share is that he cannot be substituted out: even if you were to make a Mission Impossible film without him, you’re not gonna be able to find someone with the ingredients to his secret sauce. And, as the first true Old Man Cruise film, Maverick offers up plentiful proof as to why.
In the nearly-40 years since we last saw Maverick take to the skies, the world has changed: drone warfare has began to eliminate the need for pilots to be physically present in their aircraft, as one trades personal risk for impersonal safety, and the nature of combat has also shifted. Dogfighting is a thing of the past, and those brave enough to actually put their lives on the line in physical conflict are finding their opportunities slowly winnowing down in number. Likewise, the U.S. no longer has a guaranteed air advantage, as a new generation of fighter plane has emerged and outclassed F-35s. It’s in this light that Maverick’s current role is presented to us: He’s a Chuck Yeager-like test pilot, looking to go Mach 10 in a specially-made stealth plane before his program is shut down by Ed Harris’ drone-centric general and all his comrades lose their jobs and commissions (it’s also a funny counterpoint to Cruise’s rant on the Dead Reckoning set, as Cruise just wants to see his dudes get paid for their hard-earned efforts). After “stealing” the jet before the general arrives, going faster than Mach 10, and crashing the plane, he’s reassigned to TOPGUN by Admiral Kazansky (Val Kilmer), better known as “Iceman,” his guardian angel and commander of the Pacific Fleet, to train a team of the best pilots for an impossible-seeming mission. They’ll have to fly below radar through a series of canyons, hit a tiny target with cluster bombs, and fly out at basically a vertical angle while dodging SAMs and potentially enemy planes. All that, in under three minutes, and Maverick’s the only dude with the knowhow to teach these kids.
The problems only emerge when Mav finds out that among the candidates for the mission is the son of Goose, his former partner who died while they were on a training exercise. Rooster (Miles Teller) resents the hell out of the old man, who pulled his papers when the kid tried to go to the Naval Academy out of respect for Goose’s widow — she didn’t want her son going down the same path that her husband did, and Maverick decided to shoulder the blame so that he wouldn’t grow up resenting her. But he’s one of the best pilots in the Navy, and he’s honor-bound to consider him for the mission. But Goose’s death is still a source of emotional turmoil for Maverick: He talks to him in moments of weakness, pleading with him for help from the back seat in the great beyond, and there’s a reasonable case to be made that this is part of why he never made it to Admiral. He never wanted to shoulder the responsibility for lives beyond his own, and never felt comfortable behind a desk: he continues to feel the need for speed, the glory of motion and movement at impossible speeds, the weight of gravity pulling him down to Earth as he defies the odds and the laws of physics and human capacity. His previous stint at TOPGUN ended with him heading back into the breach, and now he has to confront that. It’s the end of his career, and worse, it might be the end of these kids’ lives. Cruise embodies this conflict without giving up any of his swagger: He’s cool and collected, but unlike so much of his other work, he’s allowed to feel recognizable emotions. It’s this that separates him from Ethan Hunt: they’re both angsty in their own way, but Maverick is fundamentally more honest as a character in that he fucks up and gets in his own way but pulls through.
None of this would matter if Kosinski didn’t put the life-and-death stakes of this situation in clear repose for the audience: The action in this film is white-knuckle insanity that will have you leaving grip impressions on the armrests of your seat in the theater. The new tech used here, which enables a near panoramic-view of the cockpit and also allows for in-cockpit filming rather than soundstage inserts, puts us in the center of the action with the characters, full of the glory and the terror of flight and air combat. It’s impeccably edited, and is fundamentally different and innovative enough to provide a swell contrast to what Scott did while also keeping pace with the style he established in ’86. And, again, it is cool. Maverick is a direct surge of energy to the lizard parts of your brain that craves wonder and speed and excitement, executed by some of the best stunt pilots in the world and the strongest cameramen and editors in the game. It’s this coupling of stakes and thrills that makes the payoffs so worth it, even when the film treds into some genuinely ridiculous territory (the last half-hour of the film is an exercise in its screenwriters and directors trying to top the stunt or scene that they just finished, and it is a testament that even as it strays into fantasy it remains wholly immersive). I hope you have the high-heart-rate alerts on your smartwatch shut off while you’re in the theater for Maverick, because you’re probably going to get a notification every ten or fifteen minutes.
But, appropriately, Top Gun: Maverick is a romantic film. I don’t mean in the sense that you’ll hear Berlin once again belting out “Take My Breath Away,” but it is a fundamentally vibrant and exciting film in the way that Scott intended the original to be. Scott was underrated as a poet of cool in his time: he was an emotional filmmaker, though he spoke his feelings in a less-than-obvious way but was the only way he knew how, through the glimmer of light reflecting off of water, through the haze of smoke emerging from a firing jet engine, from the motion of flight deck crews guiding their pilots off of an aircraft carrier. He was in love with the beauty found in mundane images and excelled at pulling it out so that we all could see what he did. Kosinski shares a similar ethos, and he tries to remind us, in an era where we’re all convinced how much we fucking suck and how failed we are, to recognize the beauty in achievement, in motion, in applied skill, and in the things that we generally just take for granted in the background as we watch the talented express themselves. There is a joy that brings Maverick back to his cockpit, and likewise, there is a joy that brings us all back to the theater each week so that we can potentially see craft at its finest, to live for just a second on the cutting edge in the danger zone. Flight, art, life itself: These are the treasures we take for granted, and what men like Scott and Kosinski and even Cruise do is present them to us in the clearest and most beautiful way possible. “A lonely impulse of delight” is how Yeats put the yearning of his Irish Airman for the skies, even as he is doomed to his fate, and if that isn’t an amazing descriptor for all three of those things, I don’t know what is.