Take my breath away
Was there any sense in which the world was clamoring for a sequel to 1986's Top Gun? Any indication that the story told in that film was incomplete, or that it would be fruitful to return to its immodestly thin characters and scenario and see what else could be drawn from them? I would say the answer is definitely not, and that there's no sense in which we "needed" Top Gun: Maverick to come to theaters after 36 years (three more than was originally planned when the film first went into production way back in May 2018). But we got Top Gun: Maverick anyway, and it is frankly nothing less than a miracle. Not merely that the sequel is good, nor that the sequel is an improvement on the original Top Gun in almost every possible way two films can be compared. It's not merely better than we should have ever hoped from a three-decades-later sequel to a film that's not really all that good to begin with, and which was obliged to replace the late stylistic madman Tony Scott (to whose memory the film has been dedicated) in the director's chair with Joseph Kosinski, a visual effects designer for advertising whose big films before this were TRON: Legacy and Oblivion (both of them films that I enjoyed very much, but not in either case because they are good*); it's frankly better than we should have ever hoped for from any action movie summer tentpole in the misbegotten 2020s, shaping up as they are to be a dark time for popcorn filmmaking.
For this I think we entirely owe our thanks to the film's star and producer Tom Cruise, whose baby this has been for so many years (he was openly talking about wanting to make the project back when Scott was still alive), who has by most reports the loudest voice insisting that this damn well needed to wait until it could get a proper theatrical release, rather than going straight to streaming on Paramount+, where a decades-later nostalgia grab might be expected to go. Perhaps owing to his other great success in modern action cinema with Paramount's Mission: Impossible franchise, Cruise was also, we are told, a major factor in why so much of Top Gun: Maverick was shot practically, putting its actual human actor in actual planes and subjecting them to the actual experience of being involved in high-speed, high-altitude flight. Cruise owes this material; Top Gun was the single film with which he made the largest part of the move from "handsome young up-and-coming movie star" to "Hollywood A-lister and one of the dozen or so most recognisable film actors in the world". It's a happy balance that perhaps more than anything else he's ever starred in, Maverick is (not even all that secretly) all about how he is now an elder statesman of movie superstardom, a force for pure good in the world of popcorn filmmaking no matter what we might otherwise think of his personal shortcomings.
Herein, Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, the character played then and now by Cruise, is tasked with training a new generation of ultra hotshot young pilots how to execute a spectacularly complicated mission that involves flying at insanely fast speeds through an undulating canyon, and then flying up and quickly spinning around to fly down and then fly back up at even more insanely fast speeds. "It cannot be done at all!" the hotshots declare. "It cannot be done with a safe guarantee that we'll get the results we want, and I think you're too worried about making sure the humans come back alive" grumbles Admiral "Cyclone" Simpson (Jon Hamm), in charge of Maverick being in charge of the training. "We should just automate everything all to hell and replace human pilots with automated drones" grumbles Rear Admiral "Hammer" Cain (Ed Harris), who only appears in the very beginning of the film to shake his head at Maverick angrily and make sure the film has mentioned drones, something that otherwise never show up in the story at all. Replace "drones" with "content generating algorithms" and "keep the humans alive" with "keep practical filmmaking alive", and Maverick is nothing less than allegory for the right and proper way to make big spectacular popcorn movies, where Tom Cruise keeps happily attempting to literally kill himself on camera because he knows that it makes for better cinema when you can feel that physical presence, and he has to browbeat his young colleagues who would be just as happy doing all of this in front of a green screen that no, you will be doing this in a real plane, you will puke your guts out because of the G-forces it's going to involve and the audience will love it.
Well, this viewer loved it, anyway. In addition to proving (as if it needed to be proven!) that Cruise's messianic commitment to Putting On A Show is pretty much the single best thing that American blockbuster filmmaking has right now - Top Gun: Maverick is far and away the best English-language action film to come out since Cruise's last starring vehicle, 2018's Mission: Impossible - Fallout, and there's no chance that's a coincidence - the film proves (as if it needed to be proven!) that no matter how expensive and photorealistic your computer generated effects might be, they simply do no, maybe cannot, possess the aura and screen presence of practical stunts and effects. When the film is clicking, something it does routinely throughout its 131 minutes, and which it does entirely without pause for its final 40 minutes or so, it's a celebration of the wild spectacular excess that is the unique domain of big-budget Hollywood studio filmmaking, where God knows how much money has been slapped onto the screen to present larger-than-life nonsense that has no care in the world but the impressive the holy hell out of a viewer. If it can, along the way, generate some actual emotional resonance, so much the better. If it tells a rich story with thematic depth, that's almost certainly an accident, but not inherently a good or bad one.
In the case of Top Gun: Maverick, the story is, well, I already sketched out it. It's not rich, and the thematic depth is "boy, the U.S. Navy sure can afford some mighty swell-lookin' planes!". The beats of the story are almost a one-to-one match with the beats of Top Gun, tweaked largely to reflect the difference between a Tom Cruise who's a charismatic, cocksure young upstart, and a Tom Cruise who has finally, at the age of 55 (when the film entered production), decided to let his age be a Big Thing in the movie. Not that Maverick is creaking and hobbled with the effort to move his decrepit bones through their paces, but there are wrinkles. There is a clear sense that our hero has a body that can be damaged, and that he has lived long enough to have fucked up in the kind of ways that you don't get to un-fuck, even if you can mitigate the fuckedness.
But otherwise, this is a veritable clone of its predecessor, more so than any legacy sequel has been a direct clone of the original since Star Wars: The Force Awakens did a find/replace on the story of Star Wars. The difference being that Maverick is a much, much better movie than Top Gun, and not just in terms of the writing. I think, literally, the only vector of comparison by which the 1986 film still wins is that Scott and cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball were excitingly brash about using gaudy color filters to add a sense of dynamic stylisation to that film, whereas Kosinski and new cinematographer Claudio Miranda have largely contended themselves with leaving the images looking pretty naturalistic, with the exception of the gold-drenched opening credits sequence, which is virtually a shot-for-shot remake of the the opening credits of the original, and the handful of key moments where dramatic silhouettes against a low sun will give a moment some extra oomph. And that's not to say Maverick isn't well shot: there are some really lovely moments throughout, including a terrific shot of Cruise's face lit from behind, creating a slice of light just on the right edge of his face, giving a grim edge to a serious moment. And the absolutely ludicrous aerial photography speaks for itself: maybe it's the best aerial photography in the history of cinema and maybe it's not, but I don't trust myself to make that judgment while the film is fresh.
All of that footage is treated much better by editor Eddie Hamilton and "additional editor" Chris Lebenzon; one of the biggest problems with the first movie is that its own jawdropping aerial photography has been cut into illegible ribbons, but here in Maverick, no matter how fast-moving and chaotic the flying gets, we always have a precise sense of who is located where, relative to everyone else in the air. The result isn't just easier to follow, it's more exciting, too, since the editors are able to crank up the tension very precisely, and they do so multiple times: the film's first setpiece is a terrifying, nailbiting thriller sequence based around watching to see if the number 9.9 will tick up to the number 10.0, and it has been cut with an absolute merciless disregard for the viewer's blood pressure. On the far end, there's a desperate, panicked flight away from the pointedly unnamed enemy forces whose climax is incredibly easy to predict, but by God if they don't wring every droplet of sweat out of making us wait for that obvious payoff.
As for Christopher McQuarrie's script, which is where I started: it is absolutely an improvement on the original. It's still trafficking in blunt clichés - this is a film whose lead character is named "Maverick" - but there's a difference between clichés that are wielded wisely, and clichés that just get splashed up there because it's easier than thinking, and McQuarrie is certainly doing the former. Nothing remotely surprising every happens in Top Gun: Maverick, because it does not value surprise; it makes sure we know in advance exactly what is going to happen. Expressly so: one of the best things about this relative to its predecessor, and relative to most popcorn movies, is that it tells us very clearly - using an animated simulation, even! - how the climax is going to go. And then it spends the entire middle of the film training the young hotshots how to enact each part of that climax, so we can see it all building, brick by brick. It's mechanical, but mechanically flawless.
This all goes for the human element, as well, and that's the one place where Maverick loses me. You need some kind of emotional hook, I get that, and this picks the relationship between Maverick and "Rooster" (Miles Teller), the resentful son of Maverick's dear friend "Goose". There are some other grace notes and nuances - Maverick flirts with brassy bar owner Penny (Jennifer Connelly), who clearly likes him, but not as much as she clearly detests being keep on the hook by an egomaniacal flyboy who's never going to put the people he loves ahead of his passion for intensely dangerous aerial stunts; Rooster has an antagonistic relationship with "Hangman" (Glen Powell), the most technically gifted of the hotshots, but also the least concerned with playing as a team member. And both Connelly and Powell are great at inhabiting these stock figures - I would say, in fact, that they give the best performances in the film (Cruise gives the best "blindingly white-hot movie star presence", which is a related but different thing). But there's never a point where Maverick retreading its predecessor feels sleepier than when the humans are on the ground having interpersonal conflicts. Truth be told, after the stunning opening sequence, I wasn't entirely sold on this being more than "the good version of Top Gun" for most of its runtime. I could tell you the exact place where that changes - I mean, I can't, because it's a spoiler, but I could say that it's the scene where a 2:30 timer is replaced by a 2:15 timer - and after it has changed, Maverick is a balls-to-the-wall masterpiece of unrelenting kinetic cinema, and after it stuffed me full of one incredibly satisfying meal full of summer movie bliss, it immediately wheeled out the dessert tray for a second climax that's basically "what if we put some Mission: Impossible into our Top Gun movie?" and leans hard into nostalgia for a now-outdated piece of military hardware that I would have never in 10,000 years guessed that I had.
Anyway, it's damned masterpiece of a finale, but it does come after a bit of a soft, sluggish middle. This is in no way trying to imply that Top Gun: Maverick is in any way compromised as a huge, dumb, incredibly fun blockbuster; I will be completely thunderstruck if there's any popcorn movie for the rest of summer 2022 that I come even close to liking this much. It just means that it's an imperfect object. But not, frankly, in any of the ways that matter.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*TRON: Legacy as a predecessor to Top Gun: Maverick does, however, suggest that Kosinski is a secret genius at making razzle-dazzling sequels that improve substantially on 1980s films that are iconic despite also being slightly bad.
For this I think we entirely owe our thanks to the film's star and producer Tom Cruise, whose baby this has been for so many years (he was openly talking about wanting to make the project back when Scott was still alive), who has by most reports the loudest voice insisting that this damn well needed to wait until it could get a proper theatrical release, rather than going straight to streaming on Paramount+, where a decades-later nostalgia grab might be expected to go. Perhaps owing to his other great success in modern action cinema with Paramount's Mission: Impossible franchise, Cruise was also, we are told, a major factor in why so much of Top Gun: Maverick was shot practically, putting its actual human actor in actual planes and subjecting them to the actual experience of being involved in high-speed, high-altitude flight. Cruise owes this material; Top Gun was the single film with which he made the largest part of the move from "handsome young up-and-coming movie star" to "Hollywood A-lister and one of the dozen or so most recognisable film actors in the world". It's a happy balance that perhaps more than anything else he's ever starred in, Maverick is (not even all that secretly) all about how he is now an elder statesman of movie superstardom, a force for pure good in the world of popcorn filmmaking no matter what we might otherwise think of his personal shortcomings.
Herein, Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, the character played then and now by Cruise, is tasked with training a new generation of ultra hotshot young pilots how to execute a spectacularly complicated mission that involves flying at insanely fast speeds through an undulating canyon, and then flying up and quickly spinning around to fly down and then fly back up at even more insanely fast speeds. "It cannot be done at all!" the hotshots declare. "It cannot be done with a safe guarantee that we'll get the results we want, and I think you're too worried about making sure the humans come back alive" grumbles Admiral "Cyclone" Simpson (Jon Hamm), in charge of Maverick being in charge of the training. "We should just automate everything all to hell and replace human pilots with automated drones" grumbles Rear Admiral "Hammer" Cain (Ed Harris), who only appears in the very beginning of the film to shake his head at Maverick angrily and make sure the film has mentioned drones, something that otherwise never show up in the story at all. Replace "drones" with "content generating algorithms" and "keep the humans alive" with "keep practical filmmaking alive", and Maverick is nothing less than allegory for the right and proper way to make big spectacular popcorn movies, where Tom Cruise keeps happily attempting to literally kill himself on camera because he knows that it makes for better cinema when you can feel that physical presence, and he has to browbeat his young colleagues who would be just as happy doing all of this in front of a green screen that no, you will be doing this in a real plane, you will puke your guts out because of the G-forces it's going to involve and the audience will love it.
Well, this viewer loved it, anyway. In addition to proving (as if it needed to be proven!) that Cruise's messianic commitment to Putting On A Show is pretty much the single best thing that American blockbuster filmmaking has right now - Top Gun: Maverick is far and away the best English-language action film to come out since Cruise's last starring vehicle, 2018's Mission: Impossible - Fallout, and there's no chance that's a coincidence - the film proves (as if it needed to be proven!) that no matter how expensive and photorealistic your computer generated effects might be, they simply do no, maybe cannot, possess the aura and screen presence of practical stunts and effects. When the film is clicking, something it does routinely throughout its 131 minutes, and which it does entirely without pause for its final 40 minutes or so, it's a celebration of the wild spectacular excess that is the unique domain of big-budget Hollywood studio filmmaking, where God knows how much money has been slapped onto the screen to present larger-than-life nonsense that has no care in the world but the impressive the holy hell out of a viewer. If it can, along the way, generate some actual emotional resonance, so much the better. If it tells a rich story with thematic depth, that's almost certainly an accident, but not inherently a good or bad one.
In the case of Top Gun: Maverick, the story is, well, I already sketched out it. It's not rich, and the thematic depth is "boy, the U.S. Navy sure can afford some mighty swell-lookin' planes!". The beats of the story are almost a one-to-one match with the beats of Top Gun, tweaked largely to reflect the difference between a Tom Cruise who's a charismatic, cocksure young upstart, and a Tom Cruise who has finally, at the age of 55 (when the film entered production), decided to let his age be a Big Thing in the movie. Not that Maverick is creaking and hobbled with the effort to move his decrepit bones through their paces, but there are wrinkles. There is a clear sense that our hero has a body that can be damaged, and that he has lived long enough to have fucked up in the kind of ways that you don't get to un-fuck, even if you can mitigate the fuckedness.
But otherwise, this is a veritable clone of its predecessor, more so than any legacy sequel has been a direct clone of the original since Star Wars: The Force Awakens did a find/replace on the story of Star Wars. The difference being that Maverick is a much, much better movie than Top Gun, and not just in terms of the writing. I think, literally, the only vector of comparison by which the 1986 film still wins is that Scott and cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball were excitingly brash about using gaudy color filters to add a sense of dynamic stylisation to that film, whereas Kosinski and new cinematographer Claudio Miranda have largely contended themselves with leaving the images looking pretty naturalistic, with the exception of the gold-drenched opening credits sequence, which is virtually a shot-for-shot remake of the the opening credits of the original, and the handful of key moments where dramatic silhouettes against a low sun will give a moment some extra oomph. And that's not to say Maverick isn't well shot: there are some really lovely moments throughout, including a terrific shot of Cruise's face lit from behind, creating a slice of light just on the right edge of his face, giving a grim edge to a serious moment. And the absolutely ludicrous aerial photography speaks for itself: maybe it's the best aerial photography in the history of cinema and maybe it's not, but I don't trust myself to make that judgment while the film is fresh.
All of that footage is treated much better by editor Eddie Hamilton and "additional editor" Chris Lebenzon; one of the biggest problems with the first movie is that its own jawdropping aerial photography has been cut into illegible ribbons, but here in Maverick, no matter how fast-moving and chaotic the flying gets, we always have a precise sense of who is located where, relative to everyone else in the air. The result isn't just easier to follow, it's more exciting, too, since the editors are able to crank up the tension very precisely, and they do so multiple times: the film's first setpiece is a terrifying, nailbiting thriller sequence based around watching to see if the number 9.9 will tick up to the number 10.0, and it has been cut with an absolute merciless disregard for the viewer's blood pressure. On the far end, there's a desperate, panicked flight away from the pointedly unnamed enemy forces whose climax is incredibly easy to predict, but by God if they don't wring every droplet of sweat out of making us wait for that obvious payoff.
As for Christopher McQuarrie's script, which is where I started: it is absolutely an improvement on the original. It's still trafficking in blunt clichés - this is a film whose lead character is named "Maverick" - but there's a difference between clichés that are wielded wisely, and clichés that just get splashed up there because it's easier than thinking, and McQuarrie is certainly doing the former. Nothing remotely surprising every happens in Top Gun: Maverick, because it does not value surprise; it makes sure we know in advance exactly what is going to happen. Expressly so: one of the best things about this relative to its predecessor, and relative to most popcorn movies, is that it tells us very clearly - using an animated simulation, even! - how the climax is going to go. And then it spends the entire middle of the film training the young hotshots how to enact each part of that climax, so we can see it all building, brick by brick. It's mechanical, but mechanically flawless.
This all goes for the human element, as well, and that's the one place where Maverick loses me. You need some kind of emotional hook, I get that, and this picks the relationship between Maverick and "Rooster" (Miles Teller), the resentful son of Maverick's dear friend "Goose". There are some other grace notes and nuances - Maverick flirts with brassy bar owner Penny (Jennifer Connelly), who clearly likes him, but not as much as she clearly detests being keep on the hook by an egomaniacal flyboy who's never going to put the people he loves ahead of his passion for intensely dangerous aerial stunts; Rooster has an antagonistic relationship with "Hangman" (Glen Powell), the most technically gifted of the hotshots, but also the least concerned with playing as a team member. And both Connelly and Powell are great at inhabiting these stock figures - I would say, in fact, that they give the best performances in the film (Cruise gives the best "blindingly white-hot movie star presence", which is a related but different thing). But there's never a point where Maverick retreading its predecessor feels sleepier than when the humans are on the ground having interpersonal conflicts. Truth be told, after the stunning opening sequence, I wasn't entirely sold on this being more than "the good version of Top Gun" for most of its runtime. I could tell you the exact place where that changes - I mean, I can't, because it's a spoiler, but I could say that it's the scene where a 2:30 timer is replaced by a 2:15 timer - and after it has changed, Maverick is a balls-to-the-wall masterpiece of unrelenting kinetic cinema, and after it stuffed me full of one incredibly satisfying meal full of summer movie bliss, it immediately wheeled out the dessert tray for a second climax that's basically "what if we put some Mission: Impossible into our Top Gun movie?" and leans hard into nostalgia for a now-outdated piece of military hardware that I would have never in 10,000 years guessed that I had.
Anyway, it's damned masterpiece of a finale, but it does come after a bit of a soft, sluggish middle. This is in no way trying to imply that Top Gun: Maverick is in any way compromised as a huge, dumb, incredibly fun blockbuster; I will be completely thunderstruck if there's any popcorn movie for the rest of summer 2022 that I come even close to liking this much. It just means that it's an imperfect object. But not, frankly, in any of the ways that matter.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*TRON: Legacy as a predecessor to Top Gun: Maverick does, however, suggest that Kosinski is a secret genius at making razzle-dazzling sequels that improve substantially on 1980s films that are iconic despite also being slightly bad.
Categories: action, popcorn movies, summer movies, worthy sequels
