After more than 30 years of service as one of the Navy's top aviators,
Pete "Maverick" Mitchell is where he belongs, pushing the envelope as a
courageous test pilot and dodging the advancement in rank that would
ground him. Training a detachment of graduates for a special assignment,
Maverick must confront the ghosts of his past and his deepest fears,
culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those
who choose to fly it.
In
one of the more memorable lines in the original Top Gun, Maverick gets
chewed out by a superior who tells him, "Son, your ego's writing checks
your body can't cash." Sometimes I wonder if Tom Cruise took that
putdown as a personal challenge. No movie star seems to work harder or
push himself further than Cruise these days. Ridiculously entertaining
Top Gun: Maverick. Cruise was in his early 20s when he first played Pete
"Maverick" Mitchell, the cocky young Navy pilot with the aviator
sunglasses, the Kawasaki motorcycle and the need for speed. In the
sequel, he's as arrogant and insubordinate as ever: Now a Navy test
pilot in his late 50s, Maverick still knows how to tick off his
superiors, as we see in an exciting opening sequence where he pushes a
new plane beyond its limits. Partly as punishment, he's ordered to
return to TOPGUN, the elite pilot-training school, and train its best
and brightest for an impossibly dangerous new mission. And so the three
screenwriters of Top Gun: Maverick - including Cruise's regular Mission:
Impossible writer-director, Christopher McQuarrie - have taken the
threads of the original and spun them into an intergenerational male
weepie, a dad movie of truly epic proportions. They're tapping into
nostalgia for the original, while aiming for new levels of emotional
grandeur. To that end, the soundtrack features a Lady Gaga song, "Hold
My Hand." It's nowhere near as iconic a chart topper as the original
movie's "Take My Breath Away," but tugs at your heartstrings
nonetheless. The action sequences are much more thrilling and immersive
than in the original. You feel like you're really in the cockpit with
these pilots, and that's because you are: The actors underwent intense
flight training and flew actual planes during shooting. In that respect,
Top Gun: Maverick feels like a throwback to a lost era of practical
moviemaking, before computer-generated visual effects took over
Hollywood. You start to understand why Cruise, the creative force behind
the movie, was so driven to make it: In telling a story where older and
younger pilots butt heads, and state-of-the-art F-18s duke it out with
rusty old F-14s, he's trying to show us that there's room for the old
and the new to coexist. He's also advancing a case for the enduring
appeal of the movies and their power to transport us with viscerally
gripping action and big, sweeping emotions.