Movie Review : Top Gun - Maverick (2022)
If any movie was ever worth feeling nostalgia over, Top Gun makes one of the most understandable cases. Nothing about the world it was written in is even remotely similar to the world we live in now. There was no internet. The Berlin Wall was still up. Gender roles were unquestioned. Good guys and bad guys made consensus. So, I can understand wanting more of how Top Gun makes you feel. But you have to be careful what you wish for. Top Gun : Maverick happened and while it doesn’t suck, it’s pretty darn weird.
Top Gun : Maverick is set thirty years after the events of the first. Maverick (Tom Cruise) is brought back to the academy to teach elite fighter pilots how to achieve a crazy-ass mission of bombing a nuclear plant set in a valley that is almost inaccessible to planes. Over there, he meets Goose’s son Rooster (the always entertaining Miles Teller), who hates Maverick for reasons he doesn’t quite seem to understand himself. They will have to overcome the past and their own dicks in order to work together.
The Thing About Soft Reboots
I’m sorry, but Top Gun : Maverick is barely a movie. It's not unentertaining or nearly as politically rotten as it's been made out to be, but it is tiptoeing that line between original content and soft reboot. The opening sequence is the exact same as the one in the original. So much, I had to verify whether I had rented the original. A soft reboot is a reboot of a movie or a series that happens in continuity with the events presented in the previous material and Top Gun : Maverick inches very close to this definition.
It’s happening mostly on the elite fighter pilot school ground. It is a battle of egos between elite overachievers. There’s a foreign enemy, but it’s unclear who and you never really see a face. The mission differs slightly and takes more screentime than in the original, but director Joseph Kosinski's obvious goal is to make you feel like the original Top Gun made you feel and he did… OK, I guess? The main difference is Maverick coming to terms with his grief over Goose’s death through his relationship to Rooster.
But it this really what we wanted out of a Top Gun movie? Maverick turning into an, old school special ops dad who simultaneously owns and protects his sons by proxy on the battlefield? It’s cute and whatnot, but I’d rather rewatch the original? I'm in the minority about this, but I don't care. Top Gun : Maverick does a fine job at going through the motions of an action movie and arguably had better action scenes than the original, but it doesn't deliver what I love Top Gun for: a bunch of lovable assholes.
I didn’t make me feel much nostalgia.
The politics of elite fighter pilots
One argument about Top Gun : Maverick that floated around since its release is that it’s superpoliticized nationalist garbage and I'm on the fence about that. The nuclear plot is as nondescript as it gets. The boys are bombing a uranium refinement plant in a nondescript valley in a place that may or may not be Russia. No one is demonized. No one is grossly stereotyped like they were in the eighties. The nuclear plant is a means to an end. A destination, so the pilots can make friends along the way if you will.
Sure, the idea of a geopolitical nuclear conflict is itself politicized and Top Gun : Maverick draws outside the lines to make SURE everybody understand how dangerous it is, but Joseph Kosinski’s movie is as good natured as this kind of content can get. It’s a movie about dudes riding jet planes. Not a movie about sticking it to Russia or whatever. The portrait of masculinity may or may not be to your tastes and you criticism of that is probably more valid, but what do they do that’s so bad? Push ups?
*
Top Gun : Maverick was fine. I don't think it warrants another sequel, but it will most definitely get one after its financial triumph. It will also get a television spinoff. Maybe a cartoon. I am telling you right now, Hollywood is going to pursue Top Gun until it's not fun anymore. Mark my words. The main attraction of Top Gun : Maverick was meeting the old characters again and feeling like age didn't prevent them from still being badass. Outside of that, I found little joy in this movie. It's just fine.
