Top Gun: Maverick (Paramount, PG-13)
It’s an interesting era we live in. Already knee deep in Marvel movies, sequels have long been something we are used to, but in the last decade we have started to see reunion sequels. Sex and the City came back, Friends did a special, we’re getting another Willow, and for all intents and purposes, the Star Wars sequel trilogy was fully half a reunion itself. It makes sense then, strange as it may seem, that we get a new Top Gun. In an era where action movies were standalone, twenty or thirty years later, why not stir up that nostalgic feeling? It’s a guaranteed draw at the box office. So bring the crew back together, drum up some old tunes, and rip into the sky again. If part of your argument is that special effects and film quality has jumped astronomically since the 80s, Top Gun is a prime choice of a revisit.
Unlike most of the “reunion” centered sequels, Top Gun: Maverick isn’t full of actors from the first film. We’re only getting our leading man, Thomas Cruise Mapother IV (yup) and Val Kilmer back. Perhaps the first question arises here: What exactly qualifies this “reunion sequel” term if not specifically the reunion of the cast? I think in any other film that would be exactly what defines the term, but Top Gun: Maverick is operating with another significant advantage. Not many people make movies about dogfighting. The term describing planes and/or jets locked in aerial combat, hasn’t been the sole focus of a movie very often. Much like videogames, the genre is particular. In games the particularity manifests in complex control schemes, drawn out fights, and a high skill floor for entering players. In film many of those same aspects come into play, albeit in an altered form. Filming supersonic-capable jets is a compelling is way trickier than you would think, and exorbitantly expensive whether you do it practically or with special effects. Actual dogfights, also, atop being harder to follow, play out in a wide range of complexities. Some are quick and brutal others are full of back and forth zig-zagging maneuvers. Save money on the former and you build boring but lighting-quick engagements. Construct the latter and you increase the complexity of filming. All this to say, it is far easier to shoot a good hand to hand action scene with stunt actors than it is to film a knuckle-clenching dogfight. At the very least when taking into account how convincing the pacing and action itself is.
The first Top Gun is one of those movies that, despite critics being lukewarm, positively boomed at the box office. It did the thing. It made people understand, or at least convinced them that they understood the high-stakes, high-altitude game playing out in front of them. In thirty-five years, filmmaker’s ability to convince you what you are seeing is real has increased hundredfold. Mix in the fact Tom Cruise is obsessive and taught his actors and himself how to fly in stunt planes and then F-18s, and what you get is a spectacular mix of practical and digital effects that blend your perception of reality. In fact most of the special effects in this movie come from the explosions. The flying, well that’s all practical baby. Ride into the danger zone.
Top Gun: Maverick thrusts us back into the world of Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. Older, sure, but what Cruise has added in age he seems to have distilled. The man is a tanned glass of whiskey in a patch-strewn leather jacket. It’s precisely the way you would have assumed Maverick would have aged, as he wakes up in his aircraft hanger apartment, walks past a work-in-progress P-51 Mustang, and rides his Kawasaki GPZ 900R. If you didn’t know you were in for a nostalgia bump after the opening credits that roar with Kenny Loggins “Danger Zone” this first scene seals the deal.
It would be a challenge to describe the plot of Top Gun: Maverick as unique or nuanced. It simply isn’t. After a brief, “here’s what Maverick has been doing,” segment, he is very quickly thrust into a teaching role at the Navy Fighter Weapons School, commonly known as TOPGUN. The mission set before him is “simple”: Train pilots to fly a narrow valley at low altitude to avoid Surface to Air Missile (SAM) lock-ons, climb up a steep mountainside, invert and dive into the basin on the other side, deposit warheads on target, and then pull a near vertical, 9G climb. On the off chance they accomplish and then survive that task, they have to scramble back to base before 5th generation enemy fighters are able to intercept. It’s a nearly impossible task, because of course it is. Why else would you bring in Maverick to teach your cadets?
Top Gun: Maverick then, proceeds as an extended training montage. Dogfighting training with an emphasis on teamwork, push-up penalties, a shirtless beach football game for team building, in-fighting, rivalries. You name it. Complicating the situation are a few things. First, Maverick is a bit of a shit-kicker. He’s remained a captain for nearly thirty years because, he says, “I’m where I belong.” It is abundantly clear early on that he remains in that position because he is constantly insubordinate and/or stubborn. He fights his commanding officer for the length of the film, his CO convinced that not only are Mavericks days limited, but that human pilots in the military are on the way out, with drone tech on the rise. The second wrinkle is tucked into the class of cadets he is tasked with training, because in their midst is the son of his first wingman Goose, Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw. What’s more, Maverick pulled his papers from his first application to flight school. Their unresolved relationship is the best part of the story in Top Gun: Maverick. Not because it is particularly unpredictable, but instead because Tom Cruise and Miles Teller are great on screen together. Their dynamic is fraught and tense. Does it add a conflict of interest that higher-ups would likely have wanted to avoid while planning for a mission of this difficulty? Yes. But who cares? It’s good drama!
Where this movie soars is in its action. The sheer amount of practical stunts and high-velocity camera work is astonishing. The DP and Aerial Coordinator flew a helicopter and two kinds of jets, the jets fixed with wind proof gimballed cameras. In fact when the Aerial Coordinator, Kevin LaRosa II, learned the film had been greenlit he developed one of the planes himself and included on it, cameras that could withstand 3G maneuvers. Imagining LaRosa flying next to these planes, dodging trees while DP Michael FitzMaurice aimed the cameras is something to marvel at all by itself. Director Joseph Kosinski, who worked with Cruise before on Oblivion, had all the tools ant his disposal to make Maverick a visual feast, placing this film next to the much more grounded but also all practical Ford v. Ferrari. Whereas with other summer blockbusters you have to catch yourself, remembering that most of what you’re seeing isn’t real, Top Gun: Maverick had me catching myself just as frequently. Only this time it was to remember all I was seeing was real, practical stunt work.
The only place I caught myself constantly balking is entirely personal. Feel free to cut off your readthrough of this review if you aren’t into reading peoples personal opinions. Though I should add that reading a review is, in and of itself, pretty oxymoronic if you don’t. Top Gun: Maverick, while relentlessly entertaining and action packed, is one of the most propagandistic pieces of military marketing I have ever seen. Most military movies, to some degree, are. I fully understand that. I watch Marvel movies, after all. When the first film released in ‘86, the Navy spent $31 million on recruiting, even setting up recruiting stations outside of the theaters. Did it work? History is mixed on that. But the reality is, propping up a movie to be your recruitment drive is shady. Enticing people with images of badass dogfights in multi-million dollar planes to have them then sign up under the pretense of “do what you saw in the movie” is downright disingenuous. The percentage of applicants, let alone admissions that get through TOPGUN training is infinitesimally small. Most of those recruited never had a chance of checking those boxes. In the end, those recruiting booths preyed on hapless young moviegoers, hoping to pad out their recruitment numbers. The practice wasn’t received particularly well by a number of viewers in the ‘80s. Over opening weekend, people took to Twitter sharing photos of recruitment booths next to concession stands. The film spent $11,000 an hour using the planes, building into what was surely already and exorbitantly expensive budget. One could say that the military has a vested interest in this movie helping bolster recruitment numbers.
Ads for the military already irk me because they frequently play to young kids who like gaming, playing Call of Duty or Battlefield, by making flashy, gamey commercials that say things like “choose your path” or “what kind of hero are you?” Nary a reference to, you know, killing people. Top Gun: Maverick is a fun film to watch. But perhaps that fun is increased because I am older than military age, and have a healthy, standing disillusionment with our military. But what young kid is going to go see this with their parents and think, “what if I could do that?” Is it a noble question? Perhaps. But if our twenty year war in Iraq was any indication, military action isn’t purely noble in intention, execution, or outcome. It’s an unfortunate shadow lingering by the popcorn machine. For what it’s worth, if you do get recruited by this movie, then get invited and accepted to Fighter Weapons School, don’t quote the Top Gun movies or you will find yourself getting fined by your instructor. So before you let your ego write “checks your body can’t cash,” make sure your wallet has some cash handy.
@LubWub
~Caleb