‘Top Gun: Maverick’: Tom Cruise Feels the Need for Speed. And Hero Cosplay.

And
Sequels.
The actor returns to his most famous role as a flyboy in winter who doesn’t quite take
our breath away

By K. AUSTIN COLLINS

Tom Cruise plays Capt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick from Paramount
Pictures, Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer Films.Tom Cruise plays Capt. Pete
"Maverick" Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick from Paramount Pictures, Skydance and
Jerry Bruckheimer Films.
Cruise as Capt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in 'Top Gun: Maverick.'

Another day, another secret bunker full of uranium to wipe out. At the start of Top Gun:
Maverick, our man Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is working as a test pilot.
He’s still ranked as captain: Some 30-plus years into his career and he’s advanced very
little. His reputation for abandoning protocol in favor of following his own instincts
precedes him. It’s “Maverick” after all: not exactly a man for rules, even if it means
pushing a plane past Mach 10 against all common sense, even when there’s a risk of
casualties — as in the first movie, when he lost his wingman Goose in a tragic accident,
the bitter, karmic outcome of having played it too fast and too loose.

The difference between the Maverick of 1986’s Top Gun and that of Joseph Kocinski’s
new sequel, beyond Cruise having aged a couple of years, is that the first movie was very
much a young man’s game. The characters were fearless, reckless, because their youth
afforded them the right to be. They were the pupils. It was the job of the Top Gun
program to take that wild energy, untempered by any practical fear of death, and make
good soldiers out of it: compliant, regulation-aware representatives of the USA who
were nevertheless brave. The lesson, appropriate to the Cold War era, is that
individualism was to be celebrated — and, yes, put on a leash. In Maverick we get a
version of the best-case scenario for the boys-turned-men who take easily to that leash,
which you could call a career. The once-villainous Iceman (played then and now by Val
Kilmer) is a commander today, with a family and a big house and, despite illness, the
stature and wisdom that career longevity can afford.

Maverick, meanwhile, is still getting shuffled around. The price of straying from the
beaten path is glory, no bambinos, seemingly no permanent residence, barely any
money — nothing but a spotty reputation and a permanent spot on the chopping block,
like he’s arrested development incarnate. Somehow he, not Iceman, is the one we’re
supposed to want to be. Cruise movies of late sometimes get talked about like metaphors
for the man himself, or at least for his approach to Hollywood stardom in a century
that’s mightily eroded what that means. The willingness to flirt with failure, with just
enough fallibility and insecurity to make failure seem possible, remains central to
Cruise’s appeal.

But Top Gun: Maverick finds him in his Show ‘em how it’s done mode. Here, student
becomes teacher. Maverick returns to Top Gun to train a crew of young aces in the
making, among them the troubled Rooster (Miles Teller) and a wise-ass who goes by
Hangman (Glen Powell). The young guns play out their own version of the Maverick vs.
Iceman dilemma. In truth, Powell, shorter than Teller in stature and blessed with a
too-perfect grin, is the Cruisier of the two. But the balance has shifted. As a character,
he’s an Iceman: accomplished in the way that you can’t really admire, because we’d all
rather believe that we’re the guy with adversity, not the champion-by-default sort who’s
never met a worthy adversary. And Teller does his part to give us a Rooster who’s a
put-upon fuck-up, worthy but unlikely, flailing his way through his natural abilities and
diminished confidence. He and Maverick have history, and this is in many ways as much
his journey as it is the older man’s.

But only barely. It’s not Top Gun: Rooster. The mission undertaken in this movie is, of
course, impossible. Much of Maverick is an attempt to make a case for the utter
implausibility of anyone pulling it off. And so, even in a movie which in so many ways
neatly follows the blueprint of the original, there’s the thrill of being numbed into
thinking they won’t make it.

Again, Cruise’s own vulnerabilities account for a lot — as do Maverick’s. This is a movie
set at the dawn of automation. One day, the planes won’t need pilots. If you invite pilots,
you get human mess. That’s a terrifying prospect for Maverick, but you can see how the
establishment types (deftly represented in this movie by a wonderfully humorless Jon
Hamm) got there. When machines rebel, it terrifies us. When people do it, we cheer,
unless they’re coming for us.

One of the many essences of the Top Gun franchise since the start is man’s mastery of
those machines, a mastery that always felt like a form of rebellion. It’s as much a
franchise about individuals breaking the rules (to the benefit of the rule-makers) as it is
a franchise about planes that break through to Mach 10 because the pilots at their helm
have an almost otherworldly control over them. The most exhilarating thing about Top
Gun: Maverick is the case it goes out of its way to make for the mess of humanity as a
form of mastery over steel, air, everything else. It’s no wonder that the training scenes
start off a bit inchoate, random shots of planes flying intercut with reaction shots that
are meant to making us believe that something is actually happening up there, before
gradually, over the course of the movie, getting sharper, more active, and inching closer
and closer to making us feel like we’re playing an RPG.

No, it doesn’t totally make sense that a league of young people would be put at risk —
the price being their lives — to do an impossible job, a job that nearly requires to break
the backs of their machines, in order to save the world (or, anyway, the United States).
So the movie is making an intriguing case. If you want Mavericks — people, not
machines, controlling machines — you’re inviting the risk of casualty, which is
higher-cost and more emotional. But we’re meant to think that the emotions make it
worth it.

Maverick rightly presupposes that we’d rather root for Tom Cruise than a machine.
We’d rather watch a movie about team-building, overcoming the odds, and defying our
own limits than about robots roboting their way through a war. But this is an idea that
only really works if you strip the war of anything that makes it feel too personal. That’s
what always felt eerie, for me, about the original Top Gun. When the battle gets real, the
movie still feels like a training mission. And it’s always been curious that Top Gun — a
movie about American might and mastery, about preparing fighters for war — could feel
like it was playing out in such an other-world that training missions and the actual
mission were forced to blend in the viewer’s mind. “The enemy” still feels like it’s in
quotes. Maverick is less surreal in that sense, but only barely. The planes that “the
enemy” is flying look awfully like Russian Su-57s, which are stealth fighters incarnate,
even as this is not a movie that makes an explicit point of being about Russia. The toy
merchandise calls them “Enemy Strike Jets,” but no one here is fooled, and we aren’t
really meant to be. Either way, the people on the other side are only barely people,
helmeted bodies with no voices, faces, or fear, which is the kind of illusion that this
movie needs to sustain to make sense.

It’s got other things on its mind. There’s Maverick’s loneliness, and the sparks rekindled
with Penelope (Jennifer Connelly), a new love interest given an old storyline: This is a
woman Maverick has seen and abandoned before. There’s that uranium that Maverick’s
top-shelf pupils must learn to blow up for NATO’s sake. There’s also the problem of
mortality, the harbinger of which hangs over Maverick by way of his memories of Goose
and Iceman. (Kilmer’s only scene in the movie, a cherry-on-top callback that can’t help
but feel like a tribute to the ailing actor’s iconic career, is moving.)

It’s a fresh-faced gloss on the original, in other words, powered, like the original, by a
star who’ll simply never stop being a star. The big mission makes for the most exciting
moment; the build-up is worthwhile. When Maverick goes its own way, it tends to lose
itself — as when that last mission offers up a blindside and an extra leg of action, a bit of
syrupy character building by way of an old junk plane. “The enemy,” in this movie, has a
curious way of popping up and pulling back when it’s convenient, as if the movie’s
conceding that this is all mere simulation. As hero-cosplay for Cruise, a simulation was
all it was ever meant to be.