Top Gun: Maverick

The long-awaited Tom Cruise film seeks to take your breath away with its unyielding nostalgia.

With Top Gun: Maverick you can feel the focus-grouped storytelling and updated demographics of the modern IP blockbuster — not so much because there’s a female pilot, played by the terrific Monica Barbaro, but because there are so many endings, with so many characters getting their turn to resolve their trauma. It’s possible to read this new film, with its cascading third-act impossibilities and reciprocal acts of self-sacrifice and reincarnation, as a Boomer’s apologia and fantasy of reconciliation with the next generation. (Maverick’s orders also sound like the plan to blow up the Death Star.) Yet at the same time, the resonances of the 1980s combined with this strike against an Evil Empire (Reagan loved Star Wars) make Top Gun: Maverick a dream come true, in ways the filmmakers could not necessarily have anticipated, for audiences preoccupied by America’s renewed hostilities with Russia. (“The future is coming,” he’s told, “you’re not in it.”) But a new mission requires his particular set of skills, and he returns to the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School to train up a new crop of attractive young camera fodder. Much of the aerial action in Top Gun: Maverick was filmed with IMAX-resolution cameras secreted within the cockpits of fighter jets, where the actors also sat, mostly in the backseat. The vagueness of Top Gun: Maverick makes it a bit like a video game, as do the mission parameters — fly in low, through a narrow valley, deliver a precision strike on a tiny target and peel out to safety, dodging antiaircraft missiles and enemy aircraft — which points up the link between gaming, modern warfare’s reliance on joystick-jockey drone operators and military recruitment. (The soft-focus nostalgia of Reagan’s “Morning Again in America” went hand-in-hand with his rhetorical war against the counterculture and flat-track bully military incursions into Grenada and Libya.) Three and a half decades on, Top Gun: Maverick is the perfect blockbuster for America under gerontocracy. (His disapproving commander is played by Jon Hamm, once again cast, as per his blood-borne peevish gravitas, as an asshole Fed.) Among the cocky flyboys is Lt. Bradley Bradshaw, callsign “Rooster,” the son of his best friend and Radar Intercept Officer Goose, who died in the 1986 film; Miles Teller, as Rooster, dresses just like Anthony Edwards, who played his dad. The original Top Gun, the highest-grossing film of 1986, was about beautiful boys dick-fencing in the sky before setting homoerotic rivalries aside to take on the Russkies. Shot in a high-gloss advertorial style by Tony Scott (the critic Pauline Kael called him “Tony ‘Make It Glow’ Scott”), toplined by the grinning yuppie cocksman Cruise and produced with the full, enthusiastic cooperation of the United States Navy, it was the most successful military recruitment ad of all time, a triumphant showcase for American soft and hard power at a time when our sundowning president was proclaiming the reversal of American decline. Top Gun: Maverick, which has its world premiere in Cannes next week before opening theatrically on Memorial Day weekend, was shot over the course of a year, from spring 2018 to 2019, during the course of which its star, Tom Cruise, turned 57. In James Salter’s novel The Hunters, a fighter pilot on rotation in the Korean War considers the end of his career: “He was thirty-one, not too old, certainly; but it would not be long.” Salter, who flew F-86 Sabres in Korea and shot down a MiG north of the Yalu River on the Fourth of July, 1952, continues: “His eyes weren’t good enough any more. Other things could help to make up for it, and other eyes could help him look, but in the end it was too much of a handicap.