Film Review: Top Gun - Maverick

 

Exhilarating sequel will take your breath away!

Despite being an iconic film Top Gun does not immediately spring to mind as needing a sequel and it’s taken over thirty - five years to get here. The standard Hollywood narrative would be an older, bitter, washed out Maverick called back for one vital mission. Can he battle his personal demons and get himself together to achieve it? Thankfully this is not that film. Instead, Top Gun - Maverick is as thrilling and satisfying a movie as it’s predecessor, maybe even more so. While It acknowledges that history and plays with it -especially visually- in the end it sets its own hugely enjoyable path. Call backs to the first film are well done without going overboard, I probably didn’t even spot them all because you don’t necessarily need them but its satisfying to have them anyhow.

He's flying towards the SPOILERS past the break...

Pete `Maverick` Mitchell is a man who refuses to accept his advancing age or that what he stands for may soon be obsolete due to the likelihood of fighter planes being able to fly themselves in the not too distant future. He remains an ace test pilot, still at the rank of Captain unwilling to accept promotion that would take him out of the action and literally ground him. He’s still wanting to push barriers as an early sequence where he takes a new plane beyond the limits which he’s been set shows

Yet a reckoning is coming – he has to leave sometime- but thanks to old pal Iceman (now an Admiral) he is assigned back to where the first film is set, North Island, “back to Top Gun”.  His task? To train an elite  group of pilots for a dangerous mission bombing a uranium enrichment site in a remote location. We’re never told incindentally where the base is but when we later get there the snowy, mountainous terrain suggests the answer. The extra catch is that one of the pilots is Bradley `Rooster` Bradshaw, son of Maverick’s one time wingman Nick Bradshaw aka Goose who of course died in the first film.

At first you’re not sure if this is going to be just too nostalgic. It opens with that aural symbol of the Eighties, a drum machine and the familiar chords of `Danger Zone` as planes come and go against a perfect golden sunset more or less re-creating the look and feel of the first film. Within a few minutes Maverick has donned his famous jacket and aviator sunglasses and is riding his bike looking just like he did back in the day. His first encounter with his new pupils comes in a bar where Maverick has already met a former girlfriend Penny Benjamin who runs the place. This is a great sequence as it introduces most of the film’s key players and suggests Maverick will have his hands full trying to teach this lot.

However the first training day sees the movie produce its ace card. As the planes take off and Maverick soon out manoeuvres each and every one of his cocky pupils it becomes clear that what we’re watching is real flying. Cameras fastened into the cockpits with no CGI and the actors really flying it is absolutely thrilling even when this is an exercise. This takes the film to another level, its exactly the sort of thing big IMAX screens are for. We’ve seen so much digitally generated stuff in recent years that we don’t even notice it now but to see such authentic sequences is a breath of fresh air.

To be honest the film is not about intellectual rigour, because that was not what the original was about. Its about thrills and spills and every flying sequence is terrific yet a little different especially when we get to the mission itself. By a neat plot contrivance, Maverick leads and this is real edge of the seat stuff. Tight editing and the in situ cameras ensure you’ve never been closer to the action than you are here. Dramatically it keeps unfurling new developments so you keep thinking its over but there’s something else! Of course its traditional heroics of the sort that you can see in many a war film but the presentation and the fact you are invested in these characters makes it riveting.

There’s not tons of dialogue and what there is remains basic but delivered with conviction it does it’s job. Miles Teller does offer a nuanced turn as the outwardly confident but inwardly reticent Rooster, there’s some great looks and sharp orders from John Hamm’s Admiral Simpson and Jennifer Connolly makes for a spirited supporter of Maverick. Glen Powell is also a strong presence. The fact his character  doesn’t get to go on the mission in  the end in favour of Rooster is the film’s most unlikely plot development but it does end up making the emotional heft of the film stronger.

Tom Cruise is, well, Tom Cruise as reliable a leading man as modern cinema has and draws on decades of experience just as Maverick does with his flying.  It helps that he has aged well and doesn’t look thirty five years older than he was in the first film and retains the energy needed for this character. So this is no creaky veteran actor trying to reclaim former glories, as a movie star and as this character Cruise has still got it! He allows chinks of doubt and vulnerability to surface but in the end the character’s optimism and positivity shines through and wins the day.

Even more that the first movie this is a film about heroes, bravery and the unique bonds between people who put their lives at risk for the benefit of the rest of us. It's almost old fashioned in promoting these virtues after all the films we’ve had in recent years with characters who are neither good nor evil. Some may call this too simplistic or outdated but the point of this film is not to make you think, it’s to offer you the cinematic equivalent of a rollercoaster. Like it’s planes it soars higher and faster than it should. See it on a big screen and you’ll be flying!