Audiences have been waiting a long time to see a sequel to Top Gun. After being stuck in development hell for three decades, Top Gun: Maverick then had to sit on a shelf for a couple of years and wait for a global pandemic to end. Fortunately, the Top Gun follow-up – which finally arrives in theaters this Friday – delivers the goods. It lives up to the thrill of Tony Scott’s 1986 original and surpasses its melodrama. There’s never a dull moment in the movie; the interplay between the pilots is just as much fun as the airplane action.
Like many recent “legacy sequels,” Top Gun: Maverick contains plenty of nostalgic references to the original – a few recognizable music cues, another shirtless ballgame on the beach, another rivalry between a young hotshot who wants to be the best and an arrogant jerk who turns out to have a heart of gold – but it also works spectacularly on its own terms. Ghostbusters: Afterlife and 2022’s Scream were nice additions to a familiar canon, but unlike those films, Top Gun: Maverick would still be a phenomenal movie if the original never existed.
It’s a great story with great characters. The screenplay – credited to a grand total of five writers: Peter Craig, Justin Marks, Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and frequent Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie – adheres to the crucial backbone of any compelling narrative: establishing a plot, then letting a story take precedence. Top Gun: Maverick kicks off its plot with the external conflict of a tricky upcoming military operation, but the internal conflicts of Maverick’s guilt over Goose’s death and his unresolved tensions with Goose’s son take a poignant spotlight throughout the second act.
At the beginning of the movie, Maverick is called back up to the titular flight school and tasked with training a team for an upcoming mission. This mission is essentially a Death Star storyline as Maverick and co. set out to blow up an unauthorized uranium plant guarded by missiles and fifth-generation fighters. Their tiny target might as well be a thermal exhaust port. This simplistic setup works wonderfully, because it gives the characters a common goal with clearly defined stakes and allows the plot to take a backseat to the story. There’s plenty of character development along the way as Maverick struggles to galvanize the team, all while trying to earn redemption in the eyes of Goose’s son.
Maverick training Goose, Jr. might sound like a gimmicky premise for a Top Gun sequel, but this strained surrogate father-son dynamic is the heart of this movie, ensuring that it’s just as emotionally engaging as the first one (if not more so). Much like the similarly legacy-driven fight between the sons of Apollo Creed and Ivan Drago in Creed II, the Top Gun sequel makes its gimmicky sequel premise work beautifully by taking the characters and their conflicts seriously. On top of that, the script takes the time to develop and resolve those conflicts. The final battle is full of explosions, but the real excitement is Maverick finally earning the respect of his most stubborn student.
No one can beat the late, great Tony Scott as an action director. His razor-sharp instincts knew exactly where to place each cut so that the action kept moving at a rapid pace but the audience could still follow it. Many directors, like Michael Bay, have tried to emulate this style, and they’ve always fallen short of Scott’s craft by going overboard with messy editing and an abundance of unearned money shots. Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski is still no Tony Scott, but he does a great job of recapturing Scott’s signature magic. Kudos to Paramount for not bowing to pandemic pressure and selling the Top Gun sequel to one of the streamers that lined up to buy it, because Claudio Miranda’s stunning aerial photography demands to be seen on a big screen.
Leading a cast of both promising up-and-comers and fellow screen legends, Tom Cruise effortlessly slips back into the role of Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. He shares terrific chemistry with Miles Teller as Goose’s son, “Rooster,” as he tries to reconnect with him and gradually wins him over. Val Kilmer only appears in one scene as Iceman, but it’s a real tearjerker. When Maverick arrives at Iceman’s house, it’s revealed that Ice has been plagued with the same health problems as Kilmer himself. On a meta level, Maverick stopping by to thank a speechless Iceman for all his help in the Navy also feels like Cruise stopping by to thank Kilmer for his contributions to cinema.
Maverick’s trainees could’ve been one-note archetypes, but each of them is imbued with their own distinctive personality. There are no tacked-on backstories, just a wide variety of attitudes that the actors have a lot of fun chewing on. Newcomers like Lewis Pullman and Monica Barbaro are as captivating as returning icons like Cruise and Kilmer. Glen Powell gives a typically hilarious turn as “Hangman,” this generation’s Iceman, a cynical renegade who butts heads with Maverick. Jon Hamm and Ed Harris each make a strong comedic foil for Cruise as a pair of stern-faced naval bureaucrats.
Scott’s original Top Gun movie was accused of being thinly veiled propaganda for the U.S. Navy (and it didn’t help that the Navy reportedly sent recruiters to movie theaters to recruit eager audience members who wanted to be the next Maverick). Mercifully, in a world rife with political division, the sequel is much less focused on glorifying the military. The hostile nation that the Navy attacks in the climactic set-piece remains nameless. In a couple of scenes, Top Gun: Maverick is actually critical of the bureaucracy of the armed forces and the expendability of soldiers.
Top Gun: Maverick is far from the expensive naval recruitment video that its predecessor was accused of being. It’s hardly an apolitical movie – the plot deals with the U.S. military’s use of drones and its impact on the public-sector job market – but it’s much more interested in the character dynamics than the branch of government they belong to. Top Gun: Maverick goes above and beyond the expectations of an action movie; it’s as moving as it is thrilling.