For the first few minutes of Top Gun: Maverick, I thought Paramount Pictures was trying to pull a trick on me.
Rather than try to evoke the experience of 1986’s Top Gun, were they just going to give us the first movie in its entirety? With Harold Faltermeyer and Steve Stevens’ searing original theme luring us in, a block of text tells us, as before, about the elite Navy fighter school that the pilots call . . . “Top Gun.” Then, to the familiar tune of Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone,” we get footage of Navy jets dramatically landing on an aircraft carrier, shot and edited in almost exactly the same way as the opening of the first film. Like Star War: The Force Awakens—which employed editing patterns drawn from 1977’s Star Wars—Top Gun: Maverick elicits nostalgia not only in its narrative and characters, but via its very filmmaking.
The Force Awakens seems to be the model here overall. We have the return of original stars—namely Tom Cruise as hotshot pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, but also, briefly and touchingly, Val Kilmer as Tom “Iceman” Kazansky—alongside new, younger cast members modeled after figures from the first film. Foremost among them is Miles Teller as Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, son of Maverick’s late wingman (Anthony Edwards). A top pilot who has been recruited for a covert mission that’s being led by none other than Maverick, Rooster is good-hearted and by the book—a combination of his own father and Iceman, making him a nice foil for the still-prickly Maverick.
In case we didn’t pick up on such connections ourselves, however, Top Gun: Maverick—written by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie, and directed by Joseph Kosinski—continually nudges us with “remember this?” moments. Like his father, Rooster actually sings “Great Balls of Fire” at a Navy bar. Getting a bit more creative, the filmmakers give us a beach football sequence in place of Top Gun’s infamous beach-volleyball sequence. The nadir, however, might be the extensive replaying of actual footage from the 1986 film reminding us of the particulars of Goose’s death.
For much of its running time, Top Gun: Maverick offers little that’s surprising. Even the romance between bar owner Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly) and Maverick seems like little more than an excuse to plop a woman on the back of Mav’s motorcycle once more. Whether you find all of this to be pathetically pandering or deeply satisfying will probably depend on your relationship to the original movie. As someone who didn’t fall under Top Gun’s spell the first time around (but has since come to appreciate its subtle questioning of American individualism), I was amused at first, then eventually began to feel like I had crashed someone else’s high-school reunion.
But then we get to the movie’s final third, which involves the actual mission: an airstrike on a (conveniently never named) enemy uranium enrichment facility. The action filmmaking, which had begun to meld into an endless array of cockpit shots, takes on a new, expansive vitality. And our expectations for how things will turn out—which I won’t spoil—are cleverly tweaked in a number of ways. Just when I was about to nod off, Top Gun: Maverick jostled me awake with a fresh approach to the sort of blockbuster entertainment that the original movie managed so expertly. Faint praise? Maybe. But also higher praise than I ever expected to be giving.
(5/19/2022)