The original Top Gun, from 1986, is often criticized as “a US Navy recruitment video” and it’s easy to see why. It came at the height of Reagan, using the cutting edge planes of its time to create a chivalric competitive world, where raw skill in piloting planes can save America. I say chivalric because it’s very reminiscent of the tone of knightly stories, similar brotherly love/homoerotic tensions, similar competition for the sake of competition, similar grave seriousness placed on the risk of death every time one engages in duel/flight. It’s easy to see how a young American male in 1986 could have watched it and wanted to sign up to fly planes for the military. The sequel, Top Gun Maverick, released 36 years later, has had the same criticism leveled against it. I think that’s a little contrived and low effort. What it actually is is stranger than that.
Top Gun Maverick opens with a sequence that acknowledges the end of the era of fighter pilots is coming to an end. Tom Cruise’s character, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, is working with a military-grade supersonic plane research lab that’s about to be shut down and have its funding diverted to drones, the future of war. No more will chivalric pilots be needed in the seat of the plane, when it can be piloted from afar with the help of computers. To save the supersonic research, Tom Cruise pilots a cutting-edge plane to ten times the speed of sound, which somehow proves the technology’s value. One of the researchers shouts “stick that in your Pentagon budget!” within earshot of an admiral originally sent to shut down the facility. To let us know that Maverick is a bit of a wildcard, he pushes the plane beyond mach 10, and it wrecks in a ball of fire, but still shortly after he sits down with the Pentagon-representing admiral and talks with him. Their conversation ends with the admiral calling out to Cruise as he leaves, telling him that one day, his sort of reckless pilot will no longer be needed, and Cruise responds with a simple “Maybe, but not today”.
That’s the world of Top Gun Maverick. Drones never come up again outside of this opening sequence, but the opening puts in the mind of the audience that something will be lost, in the shift from warm and alive human pilot to cold emotionless drone. The film is full of the sense that something is lost in our cold sterile world today. Early on, Tom Cruise heads back to Top Gun Academy and ends up in a bar full of naval pilots. The bar is hopping, there’s a jukebox going in the background, playing “Slow Ride”. I don’t think there’s a single song from the 21st century in this movie. Some of the young pilots are playing a very competitive game of pool and joking around with each other. They switch over to playing piano and singing along to “Great Balls of Fire”, which Maverick did with his friends in the first film. Maverick, a fish relearning water, sets his cell phone on the bar, which is a big no-no, fracturing the boomer retvrn to the 20th century LARP (in a manner gentle enough that it doesn’t actually fracture it for the viewer) and has to buy a round of drinks for everyone present. His credit card is declined and he doesn’t have enough cash, so he’s ceremoniously thrown out of the bar onto the sand. There’s a few other retvrn to Reagan moments throughout the film: the pilots play tackle football on the beach as a teambuilding activity, Maverick has to sneak out the window of the girl he hooks up with, there’s a brief sailboat sequence. It’s cute.
The real plot of the movie is a little retvrn as well. Another country has a plan to refine and produce uranium in a secret mountain laboratory. This other country is never named, and we never see their faces in planes, always obscured by their helmets. Admirable commitment to apoliticality, but a necessary one given that in the modern American landscape of internet-fractured news there’s no consistent narrative on who the bad guy is. (This is a good thing.) The US government wants to destroy this unnamed country’s plant before it becomes operational. Most plans make it a suicide mission, but Tom Cruise wants to bring the pilots back alive. His plan to do so requires deft navigation of a river valley at low altitude, followed by a cut between two mountains and then a steep climb at high g-force to escape, a sort of airplane obstacle course. Tom Cruise is brought back to Top Gun to teach the run, but does such a good job (of course between moments where the Navy threatens to fire Maverick because of his rebellious attitude) that he is made team leader and does the run with his students. The real run goes well and they destroy the uranium plant, but at the end, Tom Cruise sacrifices himself to save one of the students, codename Rooster, played by Miles Teller, who happens to be the son of his original co-pilot in the first Top Gun, who dies in tragic accident in that movie. The film pushes its commitment to realism at this point, but it’s fine. Rooster, not knowing if Maverick is still alive, goes back to save him, and does. Maverick survived his crash in a parachute but was about to be shot by a helicopter, which Rooster shoots down. Then Rooster’s plane is also shot down, he also survives via parachute, and Maverick unites with him. Together, they physically run to the enemy airbase, sneak into a hangar, and steal an F14, the same now-outdated plane that Tom Cruise flew in the first Top Gun. So Tom Cruise ends up in the same plane as the first movie, with the son of his co-pilot from the first move in the co-pilot chair. They’re intercepted by enemies in modern planes and have no choice but to fight, which of course they win. It’s the pilot in the box that matters, not the kids with their modern gadgets.
So that’s what I see Top Gun Maverick as, retvrn to Reagan, mourning something that’s been lost in the years since 1986 by reusing the tone of a movie from 1986. What specifically has been lost? The film is careful not to say. Viewers can project what they want, similar to how they can project their choice of enemy country on to the bad guys. I doubt any of the viewers buy the film’s surface level message that there was something meaningful lost in the transition from fighter pilots to drones, a loss of the brotherly culture in the US military, and I don’t think the film expects them to. This film does have a pro-military stance, but it’s a 1986 pro-military stance, so comically divorced from how people see the military today that it doesn’t even register. Perhaps it’s mourning a larger brotherly culture loss since 1986, concurrent to the fighter plane to drone switch. But I think when most people walk out of the movie, their first thought is metacritical: how movies today aren’t like Top Gun Maverick. Top Gun Maverick is remarkably committed to its craft in a way that in the Netflix era movies are not. It’s shot beautifully, there’s real tension in every flight scene, it doesn’t have stupid complicated Marvel worldbuilding. (It does have Marvel-style cameos and Marvel-style quips and like all Marvel movies it’s a sequel, but we’ll be nice.) The retvrn in that sense, retvrn to when movies were carefully constructed visceral experiences, feels like the thesis of the film from the perspective of the directors, and from Tom Cruise, in his insistence on really flying the planes and driving the motorcycles himself. The movie opens with a bizarre 30 second clip of Tom Cruise thanking you for seeing the movie in theaters: how committed they were to making this film “immersive and authentic” with “real F-18s, real g-force”. And it’s cute and encouraging that this film is doing well, that people like that thesis. I think there really is some room for us to retvrn there.
I enjoyed this review, and the movie. Thank you for posting!
(Both could have used more Val Kilmer.)
i hope you spill your free drinks while doing absolutely nothing at "work" or daycare whichever you prefer.