Top Gun - Maverick (Take Two)

This is not so much a review as a vaguely connecting series of musings. So pretty similar to everything else on this blog.

I watched Top Gun - Maverick again - and this time, I bothered to watch the original beforehand.

Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell is a wildcard pilot who delights in living up to his callsign.

Sent to Top Gun flight school, he finds his 'go rogue' approach challenged.

He also finds romance with a civilian contractor, Charlie (Kelly McGillis).

When his friend and crew-mate Goose (Anthony Edwards) dies during a flight, Pete blames himself.

Maverick looks grounded. 

Or is he?

First, some cliff’s notes:

Top Gun is a purely cinematic experience - the script is nothing special, and it is not the point.

I was constantly reminded of the story’s similarities to An Officer and a Gentleman on this last viewing. Whereas that picture is grimey and (relatively) grounded, Top Gun feels more of its moment, with the emphasis on image and sound (particularly music).

Top Gun was inspired by Don Simpson seeing a picture of a jet fighter and wanting to make the feeling he felt into a movie. The late, great Tony Scott shoots the movie like the biggest music video in the world, which is part of its appeal (and the criticism aimed at it).

Whereas Scott’s movie is filled with youthful exuberance and machismo, Maverick feels like the detox.

Top Gun feels like the heightened emotion of a memory - key moments strung together with the soundtrack of the period. 

While it carries over some visual signifiers, Top Gun - Maverick is a sturdier, more conventional piece. That is not a dismissal of Top Gun, but it is a clear distinction with its sequel.

There are a lot of callbacks in Top Gun 2 - from the identikit opening sequence to the flashback from Rooster to his dad singing at the piano, and the repeated cutaways to photographs of the original cast in younger days.

But rather than coming off as fan service, these moments reinforce the sense of time.

On first viewing, the movie reminds me of Bad Boys For Life, in its foregrounding of age and time passing. In its stars and replaying of familiar iconography (the low-angle intro in Bad Boys 3; the reprise of the introduction in Top Gun 2), the film is on its surest footing. 

I spent the movie fighting the idea that the movie only worked because of the meta-presence of 50-something Tom Cruise. If he was not in the movie, would it still work?

Maverick is a character stuck in time - and while he is awesome, he is a lonely character. He has not moved in rank, he has not found a family. He is still a rogue pilot who prides his own instincts over anyone else, but he is old enough to doubt that instincts. The film’s sense of time weighs on proceedings - it feels like the character’s struggle for relevance mirrors the star’s fight for a certain kind of big screen entertainment.

Maverick is still the best pilot in the world - while the real flying footage gives it verisimilitude, the character remains a superman. If this movie came out at the height of Cruise’s stardom, I wonder if this would play.

But with the weight of age, the uniqueness of this kind of blockbuster in today’s marketplace, and the effect of the pandemic, Maverick’s desire to complete this mission feels even more important.

The filmmakers’ decision to focus on real stunts extends to the verisimilitude of the sound design. Even in Maverick’s supersonic excursion at the start of the film, we are always away fo every shift in wind and creak of the plane’s body. We are always aware of how powerful these vehicles are, but always how close the pilots are to death.

Combined with the stakes of the mission, the filmmaking makes the peril feel more tactile. Compared with how airless most blockbusters feel these days, it is a unique selling point.

I like the decision to make the movie more mission-focused rather than character-focused, but that probably has more to do with my disinterest in these characters. 

I also liked the fact that it was more of an action movie. Because so much of the movie is focused on romance and the training, I had forgotten that there was actual combat at the end of Top Gun. The movie does feature a character arc for Maverick (ironically, learning how to be more of a team player), but the movie is so impressionistic, in its use of music and montage, that the story takes a backseat. 

The extended third act feels pat but it does not completely destroy what came before - and we get a nice resolution for resident asshole/nu-Iceman Hangman (Glen Powell).

While some have criticized the movie for its predictability, it is based on how solid the movie is in paying off its story beats. In this respect, this movie reminds me of a theory I had about why Avatar hit so big in 2009-10.

People forget that the year leading up to Avatar’s release was something of a wasteland. Most of the big crowd movies that came out that year were either failures (Terminator 4, GI Joe) or ephemeral (Angels and Demons). 

Coming out of Avatar, I remember thinking of how reminiscent it felt of the blockbusters which stayed with me: your Jurassic Parks, your Star Wars. The building blocks are familiar - the endless takes on Fern Gully and Dances with Wolves - but the story and characters are assembled in a way that is so dramatically functional that it works. And after a year of movies which failed at this baseline, Avatar must have felt like a real crowd pleaser that knew which buttons to push to get audiences onboard.

I think a similar thing is going on with Maverick. The combination of the pandemic, the emphasis on superheroes and CGI has made the movie more unique, and it appeals to people who are not interested in seeing the 10th chapter in an ongoing saga, or watching flying people fire lasers at computer generated clouds.    

Top Gun: Maverick may not have the cultural footprint of its predecessor, but it is a solid four quadrant movie. My second viewing did not make me ecstatic over its strengths, but it does not have to. Like the pilots it follows, Maverick gets its mission done. Nothing more, nothing less.