“F18. Festival Aéreo Internacional de Gijón. 2018.” by David Álvarez López CC BY 2.0
Warning, this article contains spoilers.
There is much to laud about Top Gun: Maverick . Full disclosure, I am a bit of an aviation fanatic: the 1986 original is up there as one of my favourite films of all time. But coming nearly 40 years after Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell first took to the skies, this tour de force of blockbusting mastery offers more than just groundbreaking cinematography and the boyish wonder inspired by the mighty US Navy’s fighter jets.
To cover the aesthetic base first, Top Gun: Maverick is an incredible film. Quintessentially cheesy, but just plain fun. While retaining the qualities that made the first film so iconic, Maverick actually feels like an upgrade; director and longtime Tom Cruise collaborator Joseph Kosinski delicately pays homage to Tony Scott’s classic while giving the sequel a polished and innovative finish. The film’s airborne sequences are thrilling—Kosinski almost entirely abstained from the use of CGI, and much was filmed from within the cockpit of the F-18 Super Hornet. This scarcely matched sense of realism is palpable. We see the debilitating effects of G-forces on the actors, and the violence of the body’s reaction to the abrupt movements of the airframe. It is almost as if you are there.
However, between the action in the air lies an authentic and satisfying story. (Nothing compared to that of a Tarantino or Scorsese of course, but this is archly an action-packed thriller meant for the big screen.) If we are to believe Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell is the same age as Mr Cruise (59), his career has long outlived that of the beloved F-14 Tomcat immortalised by the first film. Maverick constantly reckons with this fact; he is a true ‘relic’ of a bygone era.
Appearing to be living as a bachelor in an airfield hanger along with other relics, a Second World War-era P-51 Mustang and various pieces of memorabilia from his younger years, the elite fighter pilot has defied military orthodoxy in refusing to progress above the rank of captain. This is a source of constant derision from the various members of the top brass presented throughout the film. His aerial joie de vivre in a young man’s game has been enabled primarily under the watchful eye of one-time nemesis and now-sickly Admiral Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky (poignantly cameo’d by none other than Val Kilmer, who in recent years has suffered from his own physical ailments).
Maverick’s careful maintenance of his (Cruise’s) antiquated P-51 at the very beginning of the film rings as a metaphor for his enduring career in the sky. A brief stint travelling at ten times the speed of sound in a fictional hypersonic jet promptly ends in a fireball of molten metal and singed hair: he has not, despite his age, become any less reckless, defiant, or brilliant. His ‘need for speed’ is ever-present throughout.
With the destruction of the hypersonic (and presumably extremely expensive) ‘Dark Star’ aircraft, Maverick is “permanently grounded” with an instructional position at the eponymous US Navy Fighter Weapons School, TOPGUN. Here, he is tasked with preparing the Navy’s fresh blood in carrying out a seemingly suicidal raid into hostile territory. What follows is a convincing tale of rivalry and brotherhood fitting of the first film while avoiding all of its 80s corniness. The excessive homoeroticism of the original’s infamous volleyball scene is revised by Kosinski with a wholly appropriate team-building exercise of American Football on the beach; a tasteful and purposeful take on the “soft porn” envisioned by Tony Scott. Meanwhile, the aversion between Maverick and ‘Rooster’, the vengeful son of Nick ‘Goose’ Bradshaw, is convincingly portrayed by Cruise and Miles Teller. We see in Maverick ’s penultimate scenes a reconciliation between the two, with Rooster following his father’s footsteps in taking the backseat position in, you guessed it, a resurrected F-14 Tomcat.
It is Top Gun: Maverick ’s careful evocation of the romantic militarism of its predecessor that is most laudable. Kosinski and Cruise have achieved something which other sequels often cannot do: they have created a film arguably better than the original. Nostalgia is certainly a recurring theme—Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone makes an appearance, while several sequences bear a striking and purposeful resemblance to Tony Scott’s classic—but the movie easily stands up on its own as a striking piece of quality filmmaking.
But perhaps most notably, Top Gun: Maverick achieves something that many thought impossible in our current age. Unlike much of contemporary cinema, it entirely avoids the trap of postmodern deconstruction and wokeist cringe. Archetypally masculine characters such as Cruise’s are not bastardised as pathetic caricatures of their former selves to be ridiculed by the ‘empowered’ women and gender-non-conformists around them; indeed there is a female pilot under Maverick’s devoir upon his return to TOPGUN, yet her presence in this overwhelmingly male sphere is dignified and respected whilst the male characters remain firmly reposeful in their roles. Equally there is no mention of race: black pilots are present as equals with zero reference made to their historical plight or supposed subjugation under ‘systemic whiteness’.
This is a far cry from the assault against straight white men by the likes of Disney, whose 2017 Star Wars: The Last Jedi portrayed the beau of the franchise, Luke Skywalker, as a mere parody of his former self: a peevish troglodyte suckling the teats of the surrounding livestock. Maverick appears to have transcended the woke paradigm—it is profoundly post-woke , a punishing and flagrant rebuke of the anti-Western, anti-militarist, unpatriotic, and anti-fun radical left. (Republican Congresswoman Claudia Tenney even recommended Americans watch the film as opposed to the ongoing January 6th riot hearings.)
Like Cruise’s traversal of the skies in his archaic P-51 at the film’s close, we might think that Top Gun: Maverick is the first fluttering of the proverbial windsock, and the direction of the corporate winds that have for so long uplifted wokeism at the expense of civil society seem to be changing. For a film which has earned a remarkable $322 million in its first 13 days of domestic release, I don’t think this is an incorrect assessment—Netflix ’s continued procurement of Ricky Gervais’ highly controversial standup specials, Disney’s various flops, and the cancellations of series like Antiracist Baby have already proved as much.