This article contains spoilers for Top Gun: Maverick
Top Gun: Maverick, the long, long-awaited sequel to Tony Scott’s gloriously silly and smouldering 1986 action movie Top Gun, opens, like its predecessor, with menacing synths and a tubular bell. This, as fans of the original – at whom the new film, in which Tom Cruise returns as gifted, ungovernable flying ace Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, is unabashedly aimed – will know, is the beginning of Harold Faltermayer’s “Top Gun Anthem”, the iconic power pop instrumental that soundtracked the opening sequence of the earlier film, featuring men at work on a heat-hazed aircraft carrier, catapulting the Navy’s finest fighter pilots into oblivion.
The aircraft carrier sequence, and the music, and even the opening graphics, are recreated almost identically in Top Gun: Maverick, which is released on 27 May, directed this time by Joseph Kosinski (not to be confused with Val Kilmer’s character and Maverick's one-time nemesis, Tom “Iceman” Kazansky) and dedicated to Scott, who died in 2012. But now, 36 years later, that bell seems menacing in a different way. It heralds excitement, yes, and danger too, but maybe something… else. Something darker. And want to know for whom the bell tolls? It tolls for Maverick.
On the surface at least, nothing is amiss. When the new film opens, Maverick is up to his old tricks. Not buzzing the tower this time, but defying direct orders – and burning through the fossil fuels – to take a state-of-the-art hypersonic jet to Mach 10. In doing so he saves the jobs of the team he’s working with, whose livelihoods depended on the plane achieving such speeds, but also finds himself sent back to Fightertown, USA, where he is assigned to teaching the newest band of hotshots at the Navy’s Fighter Weapons School, better known as – of course! – Top Gun.
Among the new intake, which is notably more diverse than the 1986 contingent and even includes (gasp!) a girl (Natasha “Phoenix” Trace, played by Monica Barbaro), are square-jawed Ice-a-like Jake “Hangman” Seresin (Glenn Powell), and Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), whose tell-tale ‘tache indicates that he is the son of Nick “Goose” Bradshaw, Maverick’s beloved RIO, played by Anthony Edwards, who died in an ejection seat accident in the first film. Rooster’s got some daddy issues as a result, and as luck would have it Maverick’s got some son issues, having failed to step up for his late friend and provide paternal oversight. Their will-they-won’t-they-reconcile dynamic provides the apparent emotional pull for the film (and even, in a new development, some laughs).
The deeper question, though, is what we’re supposed to make of Maverick now. Tom Cruise looks older, sure, with a bit more crinkle around the eyes, but he still looks – for a 59-year-old – pretty great. He’s got defined muscles, has no ostensible greys (hmm), and, as Jennifer Connolly’s tediously two-dimensional bar-owner Penny proves, continues to get the ladies with a coy flash of his pearly whites. He still loves his aviator shades and his flight jacket, and he still rides his Kawasaki sans helmet, because that was cool in 1986 (a related bugbear: James Bond’s ongoing aversion to seatbelts).
But this is not Maverick as we once knew him. When his jaw twitches, it’s not sexy so much as anxious. When he has actual sex, it’s so subtle that you’re almost not sure it’s taken place: there is none of the open-mouthed tongue action with Kelly McGillis from the original (and also no Kelly McGillis, who has said she wasn’t asked to return). Even the delightfully homoerotic volleyball scene from the first film (soundtrack: Kenny Loggins’ “Playing With The Boys”), when reprised as a game of topless beach football between Maverick and his students in this one, is shot in late-evening-sun silhouette, perhaps to spare the stark contrast of old flesh and new.
To give credit to the film-makers – Kosinski, and also returning uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer – this is a theme they’re not unhappy to lean into. Mav seems a little lost, lonely even, his swagger depleted, and his old friends are either dead (Goose), dying (Iceman, with Kilmer reprising the role), or else just moving on with their lives in ways that he somehow cannot. In fact, if you rewatch the first movie just before watching the new one and realise just how much of the first film is directly repeated, or quoted, or referenced, you start to wonder if it’s some kind meta experiment, or Sisyphean punishment, in which Maverick is fated to repeat the same script (“Talk to me, Goose!”) forever and ever.
But let’s just be clear: Top Gun: Maverick isn’t Bergman. There are no chess games with the Grim Reaper (which, by the way would be an excellent call sign for a prospective Top Gun 3). Maverick may be frequently referred to as an old timer, or a fossil, or any other casually tossed ageist term you can think of, but you are well aware it’s all laying the groundwork for the moment – and you know it’s coming – where he will get into the cockpit and teach the kids a thing or two. And when that moment comes, in a final act, involving a seemingly impossible mission to destroy a non-specifically “foreign” uranium enrichment plant, that is spectacularly shot and breathtakingly exciting, it really is all the sweeter.
Top Gun: Maverick is a big, loud, knowingly ridiculous sequel that will have you air-punching your way out of the multiplex (at the screening I attended there were multiple bouts of spontaneous whooping). Of course we all know that, in this dogfight we call life, no man’s getting out alive. Maverick may be fighting those greys better than most, but as one of his superiors reminds him, eventually time will catch up with him, too. But as Mav replies as he heads out the door, motorbike helmet nowhere in sight: "Not today."
Top Gun: Maverick is out on 27 May
Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
