TOP GUN: MAVERICK is Tremendous, Top Tier Action Cinema
An unashamedly corny, wholeheartedly earnest, and jaw-droppingly executed minor miracle of action movie bliss, that by all rights should not have turned out as good as it did.
“The end is inevitable, Maverick. Your kind is headed for extinction.”
“Maybe so, sir. But not today.”
If ever there was a movie to see in 4DX, with the rollercoaster seats tilting and rumbling and gyrating in time with the action onscreen, it’s gotta be Top Gun: Maverick, what with all the spinning, dive-bombing, corkscrewing, and bobbing and weaving all the planes do.
The awe-inspiring, adrenaline-pumping, and predominantly practical aerial action sequences repeatedly left my palms sweaty (mom’s spaghetti).
The knowingly nostalgic callbacks to the original film were positively cockle-warming.
And while the dramatic stakes and character conflicts may be tropey as hell, the viscerally emotional heights the film reaches by film’s end soar as high as the fighter jets literally actually flown by all the actors for real.
Maverick is through and through a legacy sequel, and for better or worse, it doesn’t do too much to reinvent the wheel of the legacy sequel formula that audiences have come to know so well. It’s most akin to Rocky Balboa and Creed, while concurrently greatly indebted to Skyfall, and its self-reflexive, moderately meta examination of an analogue man in a computerised world, an old-timer raging against the dying of his light, as all things young and digital threaten to oust all things old and human.
Of course, it’s also in much the same vein as The Force Awakens, with a little bit of Blade Runner 2049, a smidge of Logan, and even director Joseph Kosinski’s feature debut, Tron: Legacy, which arguably defined the kind of legacy sequel template that many others would follow for the rest of the 2010’s.
If this had come out in 2019 as was originally planned, Scream (2022) might have even name-dropped Top Gun: Maverick within Jasmin Savoy Brown’s meta monologue about modern day “requels”, and their assortment of reoccurring tropes.
But even as predictable as the film may be, by Jove! is it still remarkably effective, poignantly powerful, and full-throatedly exhilarating all the same.
Fans of the old Top Gun might have been afraid this sequel’s ego would write metaphorical checks its metaphorical body couldn’t cash. But, much like his characters of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, and Ethan Hunt — who by this point are obviously lightly fictionalised alter ego extensions of himself — Actual Nutter Tom Cruise didn’t want to let anybody down, so he went the extra mile to make sure that didn’t happen, and then went several hundred extra extra miles atop that, just as a victory lap.
Taking that notion of Cruise and Maverick being virtually interchangeable at its most literal, this long-belated Top Gun sequel posits an idea of Cruise which paints him as a dependable, ultra-competent man’s man, who’s forever married to his work to an almost unhealthy exclusion of anything and anyone else, dedicating his life to the endless pursuit of the thrill that comes with pushing his physical and mental capabilities to their absolute limits, before insistently pushing past those limits to find whatever the next limit could possibly be. He’s the living embodiment of Han Solo’s “Never tell me the odds” philosophy, because the logic would only get in the way of achieving the impossible, and the necessary, right when there’s no time for caution. (“Don’t think. Just do.”)
Most fascinating of all, however, is the explicitly stated moral conviction that Top Gun: Maverick carries over from Mission Impossible: Fallout — (both films involving screenwriting duties from Christopher McQuarrie) — wherein Cruise’s characters are of the firmly held belief that everyone should come out alive from a dangerous mission; that the lives of the few are just as important as the lives of the many; that no matter how hopelessly the odds are stacked against you, for as long as you still have an ounce of strength left in your body, still have a modicum of breath left in your lungs, and still have a heart that’s beating, you push on through the mountains of impossibilities you face, with tooth and claw if you have to, and you fight to do whatever it takes to save everybody.
As was said about Ethan Hunt in Fallout:
“Some flaw, deep in your core being, simply won’t allow you to choose between one life, and millions. You see that as a sign of weakness. To me, that’s your greatest strength.”
Whether or not Cruise himself personally abides by these ideals is anyone’s guess. (And what with all the Scientology abuses he allegedly knows about, and allegedly participated in to some degree, it would be a mighty leap of hypocrisy on his part to espouse such an idea that his real life actions haven’t truly aligned with.)
But after these past couple of years of COVID hell — where craven leaders and thoughtless celebrities alike have over time stated various versions of the concept that “people will die, but that’s inevitable” (i.e. the herd immunity argument), as a way of suggesting that returning to a pre-COVID normal state of the world is inherently predicated on millions of people’s lives being somehow more disposable, and less worthy of survival, than the lives of millions of others (i.e. the sociopathic argument that the disabled, the elderly, the immunocompromised, the poor, etc, are all apparently not worth looking out for, because so many of them will die anyway) — it is deeply refreshing to have a prominent piece of media so unapologetically proclaim that NO, EVERY LIFE IS WORTH SAVING, AND YOU SHOULD DO EVERYTHING IN YOUR POWER TO FIGHT TO PROTECT THE LIVES OF EVERY PERSON YOU POSSIBLY CAN.
All in all, if I could see Top Gun: Maverick again in IMAX (and I mean a proper IMAX, like the BFI Odeon one in London, or the one at the Manchester Printworks Vue cinema where I saw Dunkirk in 2017), then I absolutely would, because Top Gun: Maverick is precisely the kind of film made to be seen in such an expansive, immersive format.
Do you feel the speed-need…?
Originally published at Letterboxd.com.
