With cleverly reserved and coveted 80s nostalgia, Top Gun: Maverick sits well as an action film as thrilling as its predecessor, without falling victim to the changed times.
36 years since Tony Scott’s blast of 80s action thriller, Joseph Kosinski’s latest project drops us straight back into the action with a beautifully edited montage of aero-majesty over the sound of jet engines and Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone. But this, as far as nostalgia and retrospective “banking” goes, is more or less it; what follows is a whole new film, exploring what it means for these real life action heroes in a time where technology is taking over, but not without some unmatchable and satisfyingly fresh bad-ass-ry.
Tom Cruise, though evidently being the star of the show, notably melds well into a crack team of actors who form the ‘Top Gun’ roster, with Miles Teller, Glen Powell, John Hamm, Monica Barbara and many others giving stellar performances as the 21st Century-versions of this slick group of aviation geniuses. Teller, in particular, serves up that certain profundity that he is known for as Goose’s orphan, being constantly conflicted between feelings of hatred and pity for Maverick, creating a bond that pushes the film to its nail-biting denouement.
Speaking of the ending, Top Gun: Maverick is one of those films, like many action films, that is all about the ending—it is set out early on, and any development comes from momentary deviations. This could be seen as a criticism, as the film sticks to a very simple line throughout (admittedly deviating slightly at the end). However, it is the aforementioned performances, and the beautiful choreography of the flying scenes by Claudio Miranda, a frequent collaborator of Kosinski’s, that keeps the audience on the edge of their seat, always wondering when something will go wrong in this high-octane, extremely dangerous environment.
We open on Tom Cruise testing out a new type of plane, before the project is quickly shut down in favour of autonomous jets. It feels, therefore, once Maverick is weirdly redeemed by being sent to train pilots (a confusing moment of plot inconsistency), that the rest of the film is an ode to the strength of humans in the face of their subordination by autonomous killing machines in the military (though the same can be applied to many occupations, minus the “killing” bit). Indeed, Maverick says to Rooster a few times, both as a compliment and an insult, “that it is the pilot that matters”, not the plane he is flying. He also repeats, so often that it was jokingly parroted at various points in the auditorium, “don’t think, just do”, and other equally memorable adages that brilliantly connect the brutality of war with the depth human condition and how these are lost with autonomous jets.
Kosinski, his writers, and his actors all come together to create a film that doesn’t tell you to hate these technological advancements, though there have been frightfully many since 1986, instead offering what will be lost if and when branches like ‘Top Gun’ become redundant, a type of personality and a type of human being that can only be nurtured in an elite force of physics-defying individuals; exactly what Top Gun was about, and exactly what this film is celebrating in its ode to a timeless classic.
tues 