Unlike many people my age, I hold no particular nostalgia for Top Gun. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the movie start to finish, and I have no desire to do so now. I remember the girls in middle school loved it for Tom Cruise, and the guys loved it because pew pew pew airplanes. You also couldn’t escape the soundtrack, which ranged from tolerable (“Danger Zone,” which was 20+ years from its real cultural import, as a Sterling Archer catch phrase) to insufferable (“Take My Breath Away,” by an emasculated Berlin). The movie was a huge commercial success, but critics remained unimpressed.
So when Top Gun: Maverick (rentable on amazon) was first rumored, I admit to some strong disinterest. The sequel to a movie that wasn’t supposed to be all that great 36 years ago? Tom Cruise may not really age, but come on. Dude’s 60 now, right? Is he only allowed to fly the plane before dusk? Will this just be another stop on the “make Miles Teller happen” tour?
Of course, the movie is very good. It’s a popcorn blockbuster, and has its moments of absurdity, starting in the cold open, but it is fun, well-paced, often smarter than its ilk, and gives us some real moments of character development without resorting to schlock or excessive fan service. I was shocked by how much I enjoyed the film just about from start to finish, and if you chop off the unnecessary and ridiculous opening sequence – where Maverick (Cruise) absconds in a fighter jet to fly it at Mach 10, which is about three times faster than any manned plane has ever traveled, just because “ten” sounds cooler than “four” – it has just one eye-rolling moment the rest of the way.
Maverick is in the film’s title, but the script makes quite a bit of room for other characters, including the son of his former colleague Goose (played by Teller). Maverick is more or less given one last case before he retires, as he’s drafted to lead a crash course of a dozen elite young pilots to identify a few who can engage in a secret mission to destroy a weapon in an unnamed country. The weapon itself is located in incredibly inhospitable terrain, at the bottom of a valley surrounded by very high, steep peaks, so flying in and out requires skill, timing, and endurance. As movie challenges go, it’s a pretty good one, and evokes without actually naming a certain country we’ll be playing in football later today. The group of wannabe aces includes Teller’s Bradley Bradshaw, who thinks Maverick is the one who tried to stop his naval career; Hangman (Glen Powell), affably arrogant but also very much a team player; Phoenix (Monica Barbaro), the lone woman in the group, who is often the voice of reason and exudes a sort of quiet confidence; Bob (Lewis Pullman, son of Bill), nerdy – you know this because he has glasses – but of course highly skilled; and more. Maverick has to figure out who can handle the mission’s demands while also figuring out why Bradley is still so mad at him, and, of course, he has to deal with higher-ups (including Jon Hamm) who question his reliability and willingness to follow orders.
What Top Gun: Maverick does right, better than most films that aim for such a broad audience, is avoid the worst cliches of the genre. There’s a love interest between Maverick and Penny (Jennifer Connelly), but it’s deeply understated, and the most serious moment between the two is both unromantic and important to the plot. The younger pilots are a little thinly drawn, but the script takes them seriously as people, and Phoenix isn’t just there as someone’s love interest. We never even see the enemy, which is good as it avoids depicting them in stereotype, but also mirrors modern warfare’s remove from the people it’s killing (for better and worse).
Maverick also comes across as a man of a certain age, and that might have been the most surprising part of the film. Top Gun: Maverick lets its title character stare into the abyss, however briefly, and it is a much stronger film for it. He’s a bit too perfect, as the story seems to think he hasn’t lost any reaction time despite the character being at least in his late 50s, which is definitely not true to life, but there’s a wisdom to the character, and a reserve as well, that befits the character’s age and experience.
Of course, the script goes well over the top in two pretty significant ways. The opening sequence is scientifically preposterous, while the big plot development later in the film, where Maverick and Bradley have to work together to survive, just beggars belief. You can get past the first one, because the story them moves into the actual plot, but the second one blew me right out of the film, and made everything that came after seem artificial.
The other way this film goes over the top is in its pro-military bent. Like most movies that include the U.S. military as part of its story, Top Gun: Maverick received substantial assistance from the U.S. armed forces, and they were allowed to make subtle alterations to the script. It’s not a propaganda film per se, but the film is full of propaganda. The U.S. military looks good here. There’s no mention of, say, the civilian casualties that often result from U.S. airborne operations in foreign countries – to say nothing of the violation of sovereignty involved. Navy good, enemy bad. It doesn’t quite devolve into the level of a recruitment video, as some critics charged, but you’d have to cover your eyes to miss the military’s guiding hand here.
There’s talk of Top Gun: Maverick getting an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, which, sure, fine, it’s not going to win, and whether it’s worthy depends a lot more on what other films are contenders. It should get a slew of nominations for technical awards, as well as one for Best Cinematography, one for Best Film Editing, and perhaps two in the sound categories. Anything more than that, like an acting nod for Cruise, would be overkill. This is a perfectly enjoyable movie on its own merits. We don’t have to overpraise it to appreciate it for what it is.