Top Gun: Maverick: 'Hits its target with explosive force'

With a smarter story, funnier dialogue and more nausea-inducing aerial stunts, Top Gun: Maverick outpaces the 1986 original, writes Nicholas Barber.

Top Gun was one of the most fundamentally 1980s-ish of all the films made in the 1980s. Glossy, superficial and drenched in soft-rock anthems, Tony Scott's aerobatic male-bonding movie was a celebration of US militarism, expensive hardware and the burning of oceans of fossil fuels. (Climate change? What climate change?) It was also the film that turned the fresh-faced Tom Cruise into a superstar. But times have changed since 1986, so to bring back Cruise as the US Navy's Pete "Maverick" Mitchell this far into the 21st Century was always going to be – to quote another of his 1980s hits – a risky business. After all, The Matrix: Resurrections and Ghostbusters: Afterlife had their fans (I wasn't one of them) and Star Wars: The Force Awakens was a hit, but none of them matched the decades-old blockbusters they were straining so obviously to emulate.

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Amazingly, Top Gun: Maverick bucks the trend. Directed by Joseph Kosinski (who made another belated 1980s sequel, Tron: Legacy), and co-written by Cruise's regular Mission: Impossible director, Christopher McQuarrie, it's a sincere homage to the original Top Gun. The opening blurb and aircraft-carrier montage are pretty much identical to their 1986 equivalents; it closes with a dedication to Tony Scott, who died in 2012; and in between it keeps referring back to the characters and incidents of its predecessor. The plot outline is similar, too, in that it is set in the navy's elite flying school – aka Top Gun – where a group of cocky "best of the best" pilots all have such superhero-worthy call signs as Hangman (Glenn Powell) and Phoenix (Monica Barbaro).

And yet the new film improves on the old one in every respect. The story is cleverer and more gripping, the dialogue is sharper and funnier, the relationships are richer, the aerial stunts are more likely to make you queasy. In many shots, the actors are clearly in the planes, and while they may not be doing the piloting, they are certainly being flung around at stomach-flipping speeds. Viewers will feel as if they are being flung around, too.

The filmmakers have crafted the kind of impossibly fast, high-altitude rollercoaster sequences that will have you leaning back in your cinema seat as if your own weight might be able to push the planes over the mountaintops they're skimming. And again, these sequences are far superior to the ones shot for the first film. Even Tom's teeth are better than they were in 1986. Pete may not have risen above the rank of captain, but the navy must have an impressive dental insurance plan. 

Despite what he said in the original film, he hasn't spent much of the last 30-odd years as a Top Gun instructor. Instead, he's ended up as a test pilot who hangs out in a hangar in the Mojave Desert, and then races on his motorbike to another hangar every morning to try out the navy's latest supersonic plane. An admiral played by Ed Harris makes some cutting comments about how fighter pilots are all going to be rendered obsolete by drones in the near future, but the screenplay drops this theme a minute later. There are bigger things to worry about.

US satellites have spotted a uranium enrichment plant being built on "enemy" territory. (As in the first film, the "enemy" is never specified, making the film easier to sell abroad.) This plant is hidden in a valley between dagger-like mountains, and it is guarded by surface-to-air missile systems and fifth-generation fighter jets. I'm not sure what that last bit means, exactly, but we can safely assume that they're much better than fourth-generation fighter jets. The navy wants to send in some of its own jets to blow up the plant, and so 12 of Top Gun's finest graduates are brought back to brush up on their dog-fighting skills. 

Pete is given the job of training them. He doesn't want to do it, but he is ordered to by his old rival Iceman (a heart-wrenching cameo by Val Kilmer), now one of the film's many admirals. And one thing is clear. Pete will merely be the young pilots' instructor. He definitely won't go on the mission himself. Definitely not.

This is immediately a better plot than the original Top Gun had. Back then, the students were just students, with no ultimate goal except graduating at the top of the class. In Top Gun: Maverick, the stakes are higher because we know that some of them will be going on a hazardous mission that they might not survive. There was death in the 1986 Top Gun, of course, and there was a combat mission tacked on at the end, but for most of the film the biggest risk faced by Pete was that Iceman might sneer at him in the locker room.

In the new film, the training has a lot more purpose and jeopardy. Down on the ground, the antagonism has more substance to it, too. The admiral in charge of the school, Cyclone (Jon Hamm, doing a good line in goggle-eyed exasperation), doesn't approve of Pete's methods because he fears they might compromise the mission. Meanwhile, one of his students is Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of Pete's best pal Goose, who was killed in the first film. Rooster has inherited the family moustache, but that hasn't stopped him bearing a grudge. There is even a drop of bad blood between Pete and his old flame Penny the Conveniently Single Bar Owner (Jennifer Connelly), but she is better suited to him than the first film's love interest, Charlie (Kelly McGillis, who doesn't get a mention, let alone a cameo appearance). The tentative romance between Pete and Penny is predictable, but quite touching because there is chemistry and history between them, and an awareness that they aren't in the first flush of youth. True, Cruise and Connelly are both still gorgeous, but they're allowed to have wrinkles on their faces in the close-ups.

Cruise himself has more humanity and depth than usual, even if he is as buff as ever in the requisite beach-sport montage (there are moments when Top Gun feels like a less appropriate title than Top Off). Don't be surprised if he gets an Oscar nomination. He, Kosinski, McQuarrie and their various co-writers have worked out how to make Pete a responsible, rueful adult at the same time as keeping him as, well, a maverick. They have made a carefully calibrated yet warm-hearted blockbuster that does everything expected of it, and more. Much like the laser-guided missiles fired by Pete and his buddies, it streaks towards its target with awe-inspiring efficiency, and hits it with explosive force.

★★★★★

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