It’s been almost 40 years since the original Top Gun graced the big screen and convinced a whole helluva lot of people to join the Navy. The old urban legend is that recruiters set up in theatre lobbies to snag folks coming out of the movie. My wife is a huge jet nerd, and when Top Gun: Maverick finally had a release date, we grabbed tickets for opening day. There might not have been recruiters in the lobby, but it was a packed house.
Top Gun: Maverick follows the career of Pete Mitchell, a Navy pilot who’s been on active duty for 30 years but kept the rank of captain to stay in the cockpit. The film opens with Mitchell as a test pilot for a hypersonic jet.
Walking into the theater, I knew nothing about the sequel walking in other than being in production hell for a decade, then delayed due to COVID 19. I figured the whole plot would be Cruise working on this hypersonic fighter. His foil being the awesome, begging-for-more-screen-time Ed Harris who plays an Admiral opposing the project. Little did I know this was just the opening, and what an opening it was! We even get the Tom Cruise running scene that’s become rather meme-worthy in recent years. The intro does what an intro should do. It hooks you.
Back to Top Gun
I appreciate that the movie does a fantastic job of giving you 30-something years of information without massive exposition dumps. It’s the little things, like when Maverick is told he’s being sent back to Top Gun, he mentions he only lasted a few months as an instructor there. We don’t need a full down rundown of his career up to that point, just hit the highlights.
Iceman is now an Admiral and commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and we know that from an official photo we see, and that’s all we ended. While the film touches here and there on background, it’s never huge, awkward dumps of information that are massively unnatural.
You can’t call a movie Top Gun without going back to the Top Gun school. This time it’s not to teach new students but to bring back Top Gun graduates for a special mission. Mitchell will train the Navy’s best of the best fighter pilots to run them through a mission that is barely possible, then assemble the right men (or women) to complete the job.
Maverick — More than Tom Cruise
The cast of Top Gun: Maverick is a who’s who in actors both new and established. We get Cruise and Kilmer and Jon Hamm and Jennifer Connelly. We get newcomers like Lewis Pullman, Glen Powell, and Monica Barbaro, and rounding of the kid’s cast is Miles Teller as Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw. Rooster is the son of Maverick’s wingman Goose, which causes some tension in the film, especially when it reveals what happened in the years between Goose’s death and the newest film.
I also have to mention the awesome and hilarious Bashir Salahuddin and CWO4 Hondo. He’s Maverick’s grounding and seemingly partner in their high-flying endeavors. He’s the wingman on the ground for Mitchell’s mischief and changes command with him.
Overall it’s a stellar cast who play their roles well. Glen Powell plays Hangman, a MaVerick-like pilot who you’ll want to punch in the face. Remember that meme that went around saying that Maverick was the bad guy? Well, that’s Hangman to the max. You’ll want to punch his smug little face.
Rooster acts as a calmer, more measured pilot who might be a little too cautious. This is understandable when you understand the kid lost his dad at a young age in a fighter jet. Lewis Pullman, who plays Bob, is great and works comedically as the smart WSO for the mature and skilled Phoenix.
Jon Hamm plays Vice Admiral Simpson, and you can just feel how sick he is of dealing with Maverick. Jennifer Connelly plays Penny Benjamin, an admiral’s daughter mentioned in the first film. She’s perfectly charming and great as a romantic foil for Maverick.
The Danger Zone
I have to applaud Tom Cruise and his recent take on filmmaking. Everything is ratcheted up a notch in the realism department. So much so that it’s real. For example, the film paid 11,000 dollars an hour to get footage of the cast flying in actual Navy jets.
The actors were put through three months of training, including underwater evacuation, aerial aviation, and training to build spatial awareness inside the aircraft.
The Maverick crew spent over a year with 6k cameras mounted in cockpits and on the jets to capture footage for the film. That footage apparently is in excess of 800 hours.
Hell, the fictional hypersonic Dark Star jet in the film was designed with the assistance of Lockheed Martin and Skunk Works. Oh, and they built a full-scale mockup of the damn thing. That kind of realism and exceptionalism sets Top Gun: Maverick apart.
Need For Speed
The film keeps the somewhat light-hearted nature of the first film. It has plenty of lows but is a lot less melodramatic than the first film. It’s a fun flick that makes you want to cheer. The jet footage and maneuvers are goose bump worthy, and watching a speedometer from Mach 9.9 to Mach 10 is quite tense.
The film never hits that cheesy line of trying to be ultra-patriotic to the point of jingoism. What it does do is effectively show just how talented American aviators are. Notice I said show, not tell, because the film shows you real jets flown by real Naval aviators.
What does change is the stakes. The first Top Gun was more or less about the school, Maverick’s relationship with Charlie, and then there is a dog fight at the end. In relation to most movies, it’s a small film. Maverick takes things up a notch.
Without spoiling it, the bad guys have a weapon located in an area protected by 5th gen fighters and SAMs. America needs to destroy the weapon, and only the best pilots can do it. Our enemy in Top Gun: Maverick is never identified. This does two things. First, it allows the movie to be shown worldwide without offending anyone. Second, it helps make the movie a little more timeless.
Complaints and Gripes
Because the film is so new, I don’t want to spoil anything. My only complaint is one reflected in lots of modern movies. There are like four finales packed in one. The stakes get ratcheted up so many times I felt like I didn’t care anymore. At the eighth, ‘they should be dead’ moment, I wanted them to be dead.
Overall, it’s a solid summer action flick. It’s fun, funny, light-hearted, and packed with awesome jet footage and footage of real actors under real Gs. That’s worth the watch alone. I hope we see a good Blu-Ray release with tons of footage of the actor’s in the planes and going through G forces.
Did you see Top Gun: Maverick? If so, let us know what you think below!
