"Top Gun: Maverick": review

[WARNING: some spoilers.]

The term tentpole is used to describe summer movies that, like a tentpole holding up a circus tent, support the entire moviegoing season, making enough money to justify the existence of smaller, less lucrative films. Normally, every summer features a few such movies, and without a doubt, "Top Gun: Maverick" is a tentpole film, bringing the action and suspense, giving the audience something to cheer about.* As with most movies starring Tom Cruise, you go into "Maverick" knowing that you'll be seeing some cool stunts, and that ass will be kicked.

Directed by Joseph Kosinski ("Tron: Legacy," "Oblivion," "Only the Brave"), "Top Gun: Maverick" picks up thirty-some years after the events of 1986's "Top Gun." While others of Pete "Maverick" Mitchell's generation have become flag officers, the eternally insubordinate Maverick (Cruise) has remained at the rank of captain. He's a fighter jockey, more comfortable behind the stick than behind a desk, and he's currently working as a test pilot for a scramjet project called Darkstar. But Admiral Chester "Hammer" Cain (Ed Harris, looking crusty) wants to shut the Darkstar project down in favor of a drone program: for him, the future of aviation is unmanned. Darkstar, in order to continue, needs to prove that its scramjet can hit Mach 10, which is how the movie opens. Maverick pushes the jet to its limits and beyond, exceeding Mach 10 but destroying the jet in the process. Maverick could face repercussions for wrecking such an expensive aircraft, but he has a benefactor: friend and former rival Tom "Iceman" Kazansky (Val Kilmer). Iceman, now an admiral and dying of throat cancer, helps get Maverick reassigned to TOPGUN, the US Navy's elite flight school. Maverick is brought in for a very specific reason: to train a group of pilots within three weeks to perform a strike on an "unsanctioned" uranium-enrichment facility in an unnamed enemy country. Finding himself back at NAS North Island in San Diego, now as a teacher, Maverick discovers that Penny (Jennifer Connelly), an old flame of his, owns and runs a bar in the area. He and Penny have tried and failed at a relationship before, and Penny has a daughter named Amelia (Lyliana Wray), whom Maverick sort-of knows. This complicates things.

Uncomfortable being an instructor, Maverick finds himself teaching the Navy's most elite aviators, all young and brash and full of ego, and he knows he'll need to gain their respect. To this end, he out-dogfights all of them, then gets them to concentrate on the mission, which is tailor-made for F-18s (more advanced F-35s can't be used because of GPS jamming). The pilots chosen for the mission will have to fly through a narrow, winding canyon at speed (think: "Star Wars" trench scene or Clint Eastwood's "Firefox"), below the sensors of the surface-to-air missiles lining the canyon, then pull up and fly over a mountain before heading down into a bowl valley where their target—the uranium facility—is located. This is a cooperative effort in which two successive pairs of fighters must target the facility and destroy it, so timing is of the essence. The pilots are warned that they'll be pulling some massive g-forces, especially when topping the mountain and when pulling out of the bowl valley. As all of this is happening, Maverick also has to deal with one of his students, Lieutenant Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw, who is the son of Maverick's best friend and radar-intercept officer Nick "Goose" Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards), killed during the events of "Top Gun." Rooster is seething with resentment toward Maverick for at least two reasons: the death of his father, and the fact that Maverick pulled the younger man's application to the Naval Academy. Rooster doesn't know that Maverick made a promise to Rooster's mother (Meg Ryan) to keep her son from following in his father's footsteps. Maverick would rather take the blame for having pulled Rooster's application than allow Rooster to blame his mother.

That's pretty much the setup for the story. The rest of the plot deals with how Maverick trains his elite pilots—getting them to work as a team—and the mission itself. The movie's pace never really slackens, even during one scene in which pilots get shot down, have to run through a forest, and end up stealing a plane on the ground. This whole sequence could have dragged, but the movie was insistent on keeping the action airborne as much as possible, so the scene on the ground was resolved quickly. There is also one truly awesome training scene in which Maverick gets the chance to prove to his charges—who have not yet successfully flown the entire mission—that the mission is indeed flyable at the parameters Maverick set.

I don't have many complaints about this film, so let's get my gripes over with first. The dialogue was, at times, almost as painfully corny as it had been in the first movie, although nothing in "Maverick" was as bad as the first film's "Your ego's writing checks your body can't cash"—one of the top five stupidest (and, as a result, unintentionally hilarious) lines in filmic history. While some of the secondary characters were fleshed out, many of the pilot-candidates did little more than stand in the background. I know that the movie had a story to tell, so it couldn't focus on every single character, but it would have been nice to learn a little more about some of the other candidates. The script did rely a little too heavily on verbal exposition, although this could also be seen as a plus: if you've ever heard real military guys talking to each other, it often doesn't sound like English to us civvies: they use a mess of jargon and initialisms with little meaning to those unfamiliar with the lingo. There was a plot point in the movie that could have been developed more: in one scene, Maverick confessed to Penny that he'd wanted to be the father that Rooster never got to have, but there was little in the plot to indicate that Maverick and Rooster ever spent much time together. If anything, we were left with the impression that, when Maverick first walked into the room as the new instructor for these pilots, it had been years since Rooster last saw him. If Maverick did, in fact, try to be a father to Rooster, we never got that story. And then there was the trope, carried over from the first movie, of not naming the enemy country. With every piece of enemy equipment (except one) being Russian-made, though, it was an easy guess that the enemy was either Russia itself or a Russia-aligned nation (probably close to Russia, what with the snow-capped mountains and pine forests). I was also left with a question about the selection process for the pilots: the original idea was for there to be twelve candidates who would be pared down to six, but once Maverick stepped in as mission leader (something he'd wanted to do from the beginning), didn't that make things awkward? For the mission, it would be Maverick plus only five candidates. I may need to rewatch the film to understand this better.

When I think of "Maverick" from the point of view of a teacher, I have to give credit to Vice Admiral Beau "Cyclone" Simpson (John Hamm), who twice offers Maverick some pedagogically sound teaching advice. First, he tells Maverick that Maverick hasn't turned his trainees into a team. This inspires the old captain to take his crew out to the beach to play "dogfight football," in which offense and defense play at the same time with two footballs. Second, Cyclone informs Maverick later on that he'll be taking over the rest of the training because all Maverick has done is demonstrate to his trainees that the mission—per Maverick's strict parameters—cannot be flown. This is actually an important pedagogical point, and it's one I talk about in Think Like a Teacher: you have to give your students success experiences. If all they encounter in your class is failure, they will lose all motivation and eventually give up. I wish the movie had taken the time to give Cyclone credit for making these points.

What happens after Cyclone gives his second piece of advice is that Maverick decides to show his charges that the mission can be flown at the parameters he set. What isn't shown, after Maverick successfully completes the run, is whether the students are inspired to fly successfully in simulation after Maverick shows them what's possible. I imagine one reason for not showing this is that the movie didn't have time to get bogged down in plot details. As a former teacher, though, I think it would have been nice to show the students actually succeeding after witnessing Maverick's success. Instead, Maverick is picked to be mission leader (a spot originally meant for one of the younger pilots), and we never see whether any of the trainees completes a practice run after Maverick's feat.

It's a bit of a nitpick, but yeah: I'd have liked (1) to see Maverick thank Cyclone—despite their mildly adversarial relationship—for two very good teaching tips, and (2) to see the trainees perform the practice run successfully before the actual mission.

And as we move into the film's positive aspects, rewatchability is the first quality I'd have to mention.  This is definitely a cinematic feast for the eyes and ears, with some fantastic aerial cinematography and a plot that, while it sometimes spoon-feeds you information, doesn't totally insult your intelligence. A lot of films leave me feeling satiated without a need to rewatch them, but this movie left me wanting to experience it again, and soon. "Maverick" isn't particularly deep, but it's a movie with heart. Director Kosinski, who has worked with Cruise on "Oblivion" and has worked with Miles Teller and Jennifer Connelly on "Only the Brave," does an expert job of blocking out the aerial action scenes, and he also keeps the story moving along at an often breathless clip. The guy knows pacing. It's comforting, too, that CGI is kept to a minimum: Tom Cruise reportedly insisted that everyone essentially go through a compressed version of actual flight training, up to and including flying in real F-18s (after flying in, and actually piloting, smaller craft first), as a way to portray the action more realistically. The emphasis on realism definitely helps the film—a fact that many critics have remarked upon. The film is also utterly uncynical in tone: this is a movie where you're supposed to cheer, where you're supposed to bask in the developing camaraderie among the pilots and whoop at the amazing aerial dogfights. Along with the lack of cynicism is the nostalgic fan service: from the very beginning, with the opening strains of music, we're brought back to the 1980s. "Maverick" contains all sorts of winks and nods to the previous film: buzzing the tower (this happens twice), Tom Cruise running full tilt, Tom Cruise on a motorcycle (and looking uncannily, in that scene, as if he hadn't aged a day), not to mention a beach football scene that's an unsubtle callback to the volleyball scene from the 1986 film. Young folks these days use the term memberberries when referring to comforting tropes that stir memories, and "Maverick" is chock full of memberberries. Lastly, it's good to know that Chris McQuarrie, who regularly works with Cruise and is a talented director himself, is this film's producer (along with Cruise himself, plus Jerry Bruckheimer and David Ellison).

In terms of acting, we get good performances from all the leads: Miles Teller is believable as Rooster, and Jennifer Connelly as Penny is always easy on the eyes. Tom Cruise gives his usual intense performance; whatever his weird religious beliefs and tangled personal life, the man respects his craft and wants to put on a good show. Cruise's chemistry with both Connelly and Teller helps ground the film; I've seen some people remark that the subplot with Penny feels irrelevant, but I thought it was an integral part of the plot because it helped humanize the character of Maverick, and Penny herself is written well enough to have a distinct personality that plays well off Maverick. Maverick's tense relationship with Rooster was also one of the highlights of the film. I have to give a special mention to Val Kilmer, who suffered from throat cancer in real life (he says he beat the cancer four years ago), and whose Iceman gets only one brief but memorable scene in which he converses with Maverick mostly by typing, giving us some gravelly, whispery dialogue only at the very end of the exchange. Kilmer was a Hollywood bad boy back in the day, but seeing him in this reduced state is bound to make anyone with a heart feel sympathy. His character was tastefully folded into the plot.

Zooming back a bit to talk about some larger issues: the film owes a huge debt to "The Right Stuff"—not merely in the test-pilot scene at the beginning (which will remind everyone of Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier), but also in the insistence on there being a human element when it comes to flying. Even in "The Right Stuff," there's that "spam in a can" scene in which the Mercury astronauts show scorn for the German scientists' original plans to send a man into space without any ability to pilot the spacecraft, relying only on brute physics and the rudimentary computer systems of the day. (This led to a massive redesign.) "Maverick" hammers a similar point home throughout its length: it's not the plane: it's the pilot. On the political level, I can see how non-Americans might see this movie as another sign of American imperialism: we Yanks think we can violate another country's sovereignty, attacking its installations with impunity. Well, Dear Reader, I don't know where you fall on the political spectrum, but I think that, if a director's goal is to make a happy, positive war movie, then some amount of jingoism is inevitable. Having recently watched the ultra-nationalistic actioner "RRR," which also features patriotic heroes, I have no problem with anyone's nationalism, including that of my own country.

"Top Gun: Maverick" is the feel-good summer film you didn't know you needed. It has its flaws, but as I said above, it's a treat for the senses: well paced, well acted, well shot, and with plenty of food for the eyes and ears. It also doesn't tax the mind, which is why I'll probably be rewatching it this weekend. Go see the film. Don't think—just do.

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*American audiences, anyway. I saw the movie at home, but I'm morbidly fascinated by the thought of watching such a film in a theater with a Korean or French audience. My French buddy Dominique once noted something back when we were in high school: American TV shows almost always feature an American flag somewhere. It's a subtle bit of propagandizing that I hadn't even noticed. So non-American audiences are probably sensitive to the Americanness of the American films they watch. Such films may be entertaining, but there's a nationalistic subtext in a lot of them that's easier for foreign audiences to pick up on.