As far as exciting summer blockbusters go, Top Gun: Maverick has a lot of action, drama, chaos and conflict that goes back several decades. But more than anything, it feels like a glorious museum devoted to its own importance.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, discussions of theatrical exhibition used this legacy sequel as a reference point, equating it with the livelihood of the film industry itself. It’s been careening back and forth on the continuum between essential and obligatory since long before vaccines were on the table, and it’s just too much for a big sequel that dots its Is, crosses its Ts, and makes sure to tidy up all the loose ends that have just been hanging there for the past three-and-a-half decades. Your mileage may vary, and it all comes down to what sort of place the original Top Gun holds in your heart. For me, it’s the Giorgio Moroder-derived soundtrack and then, a night in Rome in 1995 at a club called Divina (or something to that effect), where the DJ played Clubhouse’s “World of Dreams”* and the purloined riff from Harold Faltermeyer’s “Top Gun Anthem” (1:04 in this track) launched a dance-floor full of dudes into the stratosphere without any jet engines.
There’s one moment when this film feels real, and alive, and it involves spending some time with Ice (Val Kilmer) and confronting what cancer and the passage of time does; for a film whose publicity aims to amp up authenticity by pointing out how real the aerial effects and flying sequences are, nothing is as real as this moment. This is the one scene in which the world does not bend itself backwards to let Tom Cruise get exactly what he wants, and it stands in profound relief to pretty much the whole rest of the film. And rest assured, even though one must respect the way that Cruise has releveraged his clout and star power on doing more and more realistic stunts and leaning in on The Real in his action spectacles, there are several points when it’s just not possible to separate out the actor from the character — because diegetically and in the real world, that’s who’s making things happen. He (both Cruise and Maverick) is doing so much heavy lifting to reconstruct beloved memories of the ’80s while also kick-starting COVID-era cinema into something approximating whatever it is that we recall as being normal life.
But what does this film even stand for? It’s pro-military, but in the most abstract way possible in consideration of the global marketplace. The big mission that provides the foundation for the entire movie sounds shockingly like if all the manufactured lies about why it was necessary to invade Iraq happened to be true. But there’s a big question mark at the center of Top Gun: Maverick, and it’s not a pleasant one to ponder. In 1986, we knew exactly what the Navy pilots were fighting for and what Ronald Reagan’s America looked like. But what America is this new film even portraying? This is a militaristic epic so disassociated from actual life that it somehow becomes even more fanciful than the average animated family film. But this film series means a lot to people, and the thunderous response of the crowd around me at a preview screening indicated that the combination of nostalgia and an unproblematic (fictional) America was something that domestic audiences are very much in need of.
Hopefully, this film’s monstrous success will enable Joseph Kosinski to finally make the remake/reboot of The Black Hole he’s been trying to make happen since the Tron days. If so, then it would be worth it. Certainly more contemporary directors could make a point of spatial coherence and kinesthetic composition as is done here — the shifting IMAX aspect ratio did a good job at shifting the emotional stakes of a scene just by making the viewer reframe their own perspective. Full marks to Miles Teller for bringing the film’s only sexual energy with a full-on Anthony Edwards mustache, and Bashir Salahuddin for bringing the closest thing to an actual human being’s responses to the insane situations that proliferate at Top Gun.
*Turn it up loud when you play it.
