Review: ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ A Jaw-Dropping Blockbuster for the Ages
“It’s not the plane. It’s the pilot.”
At fifty-nine years old, Tom Cruise is among the last few real stars in Hollywood. Today’s audiences flock to theaters to see the continuation of their favorite cinematic universe, not because their favorite star headlines the poster. More so, and crucially, the celebrities leading those blockbusters are not popular outside their franchise roles. True stars are phenomenons, whose iconography and image bring audiences to the movies regardless of the premise. Contemporary celebrities are not that, coming second to recognizable, tried and true IP.
Cruise is apart of a dying breed. In his lifetime, he has undergone several changes to his star image —teen heartthrob, auteur darling, couch-jumping scientologist — but in the last few years, he has moved into beloved action movie icon. His most recent films stand apart because the man has no sense of self-preservation; he is willingly to jump out of any plane, run through any explosion, and fly a helicopter himself if it means getting the shot.
The name “Tom Cruise” also has a level of recognition and staying power other celebrities simply do not have (sorry, Chris Pratt). To be fair, the man has been cultivating his image for the last forty-one years. What impresses me is how Cruise has not only retained his star status, but how he has also used it to advance the blockbuster and preserve the theatrical experience. Using his influence, status, and image, Cruise has been able to make pictures studios rarely, if ever, take gambles on anymore, a fact reenforced with stunning and euphoric results in Top Gun: Maverick.
To put it simply, Top Gun: Maverick is a jaw-dropping blockbuster for the ages. It’s what every blockbuster should be. It’s the kind of film that makes you excited to go to the movies. It’s a film whose action merits are only rivaled in the contemporary era by Mad Max: Fury Road and Tom Cruise’s 2018 outing, Mission: Impossible - Fallout. Most importantly, however, it’s a film that shows what’s been missing from the American blockbuster for the better part of the last decade: true big-screen spectacle.
Though this film is technically a sequel, and has its moments of nostalgia, it stands above the original Top Gun, which, for as iconic as it is, is admittedly not that great of a film. The aerial combat scenes were novel yet disorienting in the final edit. The plot, baseline. And not even Tom Cruise’s good looks can make Pete “Maverick” Mitchell’s egotistical arrogance go down easy. The box office receipts, on the other hand, tell a different story. It’s an early example of Hollywood experimenting with soundtracks and music video imagery in an era of MTV that took off with audiences. The fact that we never got a sequel in the thirty-six years since is quite remarkable. (It also happened to be the film my parents saw on their first date, so I guess I owe the film some gratitude.)
Conventional wisdom would indicate that this sequel, Maverick, would be another example of Hollywood trotting out some dead IP for some easy cash, and while there is an argument to be made there, the film distances itself from those connotations by being far and away a better film than its predecessor by a significant margin.
The story this time begins with a senior Mitchell leading an R&D division for the Air Force. Despite the lessons learned in the previous film, his ego is still writing checks his body can’t cash. A long list of subordinations has punted him from one program to the next until he reaches the end of the line with one final assignment: teaching a new class of top gun pilots for a daring covert mission.
The mission is nearly impossible. It involves flying below 300ft in enemy territory while performing high speed maneuvers that exceed 9Gs. Training for the mission is already tempting fate, let alone actually carrying it out. The one thing Maverick didn’t anticipate is crossing paths with Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s former wing mate Goose who died tragically in a training exercise they were both on. As he teaches these pilots the daring and bold skills needed to pull off this mission, he knows he may very well be leading Rooster to his own grave, a fate that would repeat failings of Maverick’s past.
This simple theme of failure versus redemption, honor and legacy, is enough to imbue Maverick with tangible emotions that run through every action set piece. Where modern blockbuster filmmaking defaults to green screen, Maverick opts for practical in-camera cinematography, a rarity these days. Real pilots carry out breathtaking stunt choreography that treat audiences to an unending supply of stunning aerial images. Planes dive and turn and dodge and weave and roll and spin with perfect shot continuity and superb editing that helps orientate the audience even at high speeds. The need for speed has rarely felt so breakneck, so exhilarating, so death defying at this scale.
It’s one thing to have these images, but what makes them really special is the film’s acute understanding of stakes. Underscoring the film is a sense of ego-driven danger, something that’s well established in the film’s opening set piece. At any moment, one wrong split-second decision could mean the end for a pilot. This threat, from both mechanical and human error, makes every flight a near death experience that gets increasingly more dangerous until it reaches insane levels of anxiety in the third act — when audiences finally reach the “Coffin Corner” scene you’ll damn near faint.
The adverse impact of making the best aerial action film of all time is that you’re gonna make the military loaning you multi-million dollar planes look really cool. The 1986 original — then described by J. Hoberman of The Village Voice as a “bellicose 2001 for the age of Reagan…designed as a roller coaster-ride-cum-demoliton derby through the upper stratosphere” — was equally guilty of this, so much so the navy set up recruitment tables outside theaters in the hopes of luring teens into enlistment. While it’s premature to say if Maverick will have that effect, the film acts, intentionally or not, as a piece of cinematic war propaganda.
The film’s main target is a uranium enrichment site. Which country it belongs to is purposefully left unnamed, but a working knowledge of geopolitical affairs will tell you that this would-be country is Iran. From that (unmistakable) assumption, one can see how Maverick works as an emboldened piece of American-hoorah for modern audiences. There are far worse offenders of filmic war propaganda, most Michael Bay films have more gusto than this, but it will likely fly under the radar of audiences when they’re caught up in the action. In some ways, that American fervor is what makes this a distinctly American blockbuster. Nonetheless, the film’s politics are something you should consider.
All of this comes from the legend himself, Tom Cruise, who only furthers the argument for actors as auteurs. The press leading up to Maverick’s release has already revealed a series of behind-the-scene anecdotes that support this authorial claim — Cruise green lit Maverick with just a phone call, he vetoed the use of original Twenty-One Pilots music, and he rejected the idea of a pandemic streaming premier (thank you, Tom) — but in front of the camera, where it matters most for auteur theory, Cruise is a singular actor whose propensity for on-screen action spectacle is unrivaled. Audiences love him (and production insurance hates him) for this level of authenticity, this level of commitment to shooting as far as the human body will physically allow.
Over the years, it has been easy to take for granted what Tom Cruise brings to the table. He’s consumed the zeitgeist with his strange personality and public personal life, but in the last decade, when the state of blockbusters had been so dismal, it takes someone as insane as Tom Cruise, who is willing to put it all on the line for his craft, to remind us how great they can be. He is one of the last true stars in the business, and we’re lucky he’s still around.
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