.

Directors: Tony Scott / Joseph Kosinski
Screenwriters: Jim Cash, Jack Epps Jr / Ehren Kruger, Christopher McQuarrie, Eric Warren Singer

By Roderick Heath

Here there be spoilers…

The release of Top Gun: Maverick has proven a striking moment in contemporary pop culture. That is, it’s a blockbuster movie release capable of wringing the same reaction out of grown-up audiences usually reserved these days for the 14-year-olds flocking to see the latest comic book movie. Top Gun: Maverick is the belated sequel to the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun, a movie directed by Tony Scott but designed and implemented by its producer team of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer as a precision-tooled star vehicle for Tom Cruise, who was 24 years old at the time of release. Top Gun’s long-simmering cult following is both a little surprising and not surprising at all. It made Cruise, already a fast-rising young star, a major-league big screen heartthrob and instant generational avatar. Its glitzy, glibly stylish look and hit-churning soundtrack pinioned it to a very specific moment in the cultural survey, a flagship of the 1980s cinema movement where pop movies were closely wound in with pop music, both in terms of their look and in their constant deployments of songs, and their mutual celebration of adolescent fancy. Now Cruise, who turns 60 this year (although Top Gun: Maverick has been delayed a couple of years because of the COVID-19 pandemic), returns to his first real signature role. Apart from the Mission: Impossible series which has proven an archipelago of popularity for him amidst the stormy waters of a late career and current screen culture, Cruise long resisted such backtracking.

Cruise has been a curious product of our love of movie stars right from the early days of his career. At once he was the inheritor of handsome ingénues from the dawn of time, the kind who set teenage girls (and quite a few boys) aquiver in their stomachs and itchy in the pants. But Cruise swiftly evinced far more canniness than most in establishing and protecting his stature. He seemed to emulate the careers of stars like Paul Newman and Jack Nicholson, who could for the most part effortlessly step between popular, image-cementing vehicles and artier, riskier, more challenging fare. Cruise has never quite gained their flexibility and reputation as an actor, because he remained first and foremost a star, but it’s precisely that quality which remained his advantage. Acting cred was always a far-off citadel he could storm when he felt like, but his real business was making movies for the widest possible audience, at a time when many a potential rival was sabotaging themselves by acting as if being called a movie star was an odious travail. Whilst Cruise had emerged playing relatively familiar kinds of young male starring parts – a football player in All The Right Moves (1983), a horny teen out for action in Losin’ It (1983) and Risky Business (1984) – Top Gun saw him emerge from a chrysalis as the perfect emblem of the yuppie era. Ahistorical in persona, white bread in ethnicity but disconnected from any sure sense of social identity, he morphed into a blank slate of Reaganite ambition.

With his carefully honed body, his capped teeth, his notoriously intense work ethic, and his air of self-willed exceptionality able to easily straddle personal ambition and embodiment of a creed, Cruise embodied the yuppie ideal perfectly. Cruise’s remarkable resistance to aging, his aerodynamic features only very slightly thickening and hardening over the years, has only amplified his strangeness, the way he seems to embody that essence of the movie star as something disconnected from normal life processes and inhabiting an exalted realm. After decades of having his character, sanity, even sexuality rifled from afar, the verdict has finally come fully down on the side of Cruise being perhaps the last common avatar of that ideal, and the very qualities that once made Cruise the most normcore and antiseptic of movie stars for all his occasional gestures towards stretching and perverting his image, have now become proofs of his specialness, his gift-from-the-movie-gods electness. Top Gun: Maverick is interesting in this regard but it finally evinces that Cruise is at least vaguely aware of his own mortality, especially when it showcases the ravages of aging inflicted on his Top Gun costar Val Kilmer. Both Top Gun movies are, both literally and metaphorically, about defying gravity, but finally must admit that gravity always wins.

Top Gun was based on a magazine article about the new elite training methods adopted by the US Navy air wing during and after Vietnam to improve dogfighting skills in their fighter pilots. Cruise was cast as Pete Mitchell, whose piloting call-sign is Maverick, a cocky but sublimely talented young fighter pilot. The film’s lengthy opening sees Maverick and his Radar Intercept Officer (RIO), Nick ‘Goose’ Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards), on deployment on an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean, off some purposefully vague conflict zone where their squadron of F-14 Tomcats encounter enemy pilots flying the flashy new (and imaginary) MiG-25 fighters. The MiGs outmanoeuvre the American pilots and seriously rattle the flight leader, Cougar (John Stockwell), by successfully targeting him, only for Maverick to expertly reverse the humiliation by flying more cleverly and making sport of the foes. After Cougar elects to quit flying, their CO, ‘Stinger’ (James Tolkan), chews Maverick out for his impudent and insubordinate antics, only to then inform him that with Cougar out he and Goose will take his place in the elite training scheme known as TOPGUN where they’ll be pitted against fellow hotshots, based at Miramar, North Island, near San Diego.

At TOPGUN Maverick encounters his one great rival as a pilot, Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky (Kilmer), and makes waves with his risk-taking tendencies, earning Iceman’s haughty assurance that he’s “dangerous,” and tangling with tutor ‘Jester’ (Michael Ironside), and program boss and Vietnam-era ace Mike ‘Viper’ Metcalf (Tom Skerritt), particularly when he violates the “hard floor”, that is the minimum altitude allowed during training, in his relentless chases. He also finds himself involved with another of the program tutors, Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Blackwood (Kelly McGillis), who he first meets in a bar and tries to pick up, only to learn her true identity later. Maverick’s close encounter with the new MiG gives him distinction and makes him a valuable source of information for her. As she gets to know him Charlie learns Maverick is haunted by his father’s fate as a fighter pilot, having vanished during an operation in 1965. During a training exercise where Maverick is playing wingman to Ice but the rival hotshot can’t nail a target, Maverick is caught in Ice’s engine wash, sending his plane careening out of control, and when he and Goose eject Goose hits the canopy and dies. Maverick is cleared of responsibility, but his friend’s death hangs heavily on him, and he considers leaving the Navy. He eventually turns up for graduation, just as he and the rest of the class are called to action back in the conflict zone and are flung into a deadly air battle.

One immediately eye-catching aspect of Top Gun is the burgeoning talent of its moment it ropes in, including Cruise, Kilmer, Meg Ryan (as Goose’s wife Carole), and Edwards, as well as notable also-rans like McGillis, Rick Rossovich, Adrian Pasdar, and John Stockwell, and counterbalanced by experts in surly elder attitude in Skerritt, Ironside, and Tolkan. Composer Harold Faltemeyer, straight off providing one instantly iconic theme for a new Hollywood hero on Beverly Hills Cop (1984), here provided the score and attached to Maverick a canoodling guitar theme that recurs every time Maverick does something cool, almost to the point of self-parody. The film opens with consciously glorifying images of the Naval pilots and their ground crews preparing to take off in shots drenched in a sunrise glow, men and machines made equivalent in their adamantine, architectural function in the buzzing enterprise. Segue into shots of the sky-thrashing pilots cavorting to the strains of the Kenny Loggins-sung, Giorgio Moroder-penned rock song “Highway To The Danger Zone.” Moroder also helped write the soundtrack’s other big product, “Take My Breath Away,” performed by the band Berlin, which captured the year’s Oscar for Original Song, and Scott does use its pulsing, breathy, deathless romantic quality to effect, interpolating it over a sex scene for Cruise and McGillis shot exactly like some high-end aftershave ad, complete with fluttering white curtains in a steely blue room.

As a movie, Top Gun belongs to a venerable subgenre. Films about the rarefied world of daring aviators date back to classic Hollywood flyboy flicks like Ceiling Zero (1936), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), Test Pilot (1940), Dive Bomber (1941), intersect with war movies like Twelve O’Clock High (1949), and continue through the likes of Toward The Unknown (1956), Jet Pilot (1957), and The Right Stuff (1983). The popularity of this kind of movie is obviously rooted in the basic thrill of flying really fast, an inherently spectacular and dramatic business not many people have access to experience for themselves. But it also constantly touches base with an essential dramatic dynamic: such movies depict the hermetic, rivalry-filled, thrill-loving world of pilots assigned to push the limits and the constant wrestle required to balance such necessary roguish will and the needs of the hierarchies they nominally belong to, be they civilian or military. In this regard the flyboy movie is an ideal one for exploring the tension between individualism and group identity, a theme immediately interesting and compelling for a vast bulk of the audience who experience that tension daily. Many older movies were concerned with the wildcard having his burrs shaved down to more cleanly fit in with the group or die in failing to heed the lesson, befitting products of an age when conformity was required by mass mobilisation and imperial emergence.

Top Gun, by contrast, explicitly taps its potential as a metaphor for different fantasies promulgated by a new epoch. Maverick’s nickname encapsulates the idealisation of the main character as someone whose exceptionality and independence are ultimately affirmed as virtues. He embodies the dream of being at once undisputed as an individual whilst fitting into an institution, free but also dedicated, cool and square at the same time. He is the personification of a particular tide-mark in American culture, balancing the individualist ideal, both as manifest in classic American mythos and also post-counterculture anti-authoritarianism, and the new conservatism that insists that yes, that individualism can be achieved, but can and must be suspended when higher duty calls. Maverick as a character, like the film’s depiction of the American military in its moment, is rooted in a haunted sense of generational severing involving the Vietnam War that both bent things out of shape but also informs a new determination to get back on top. Only the nostalgic evocations of the former era’s music is retained – “The Dock of The Bay”, “Great Balls of Fire,” and “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” are wielded as shared touchstones, a lingua franca connecting new to old – but washed clean of any former meaning. Like the film about them, the songs have no specific meaning save as rhythmic variations for what the film is expressing about Maverick.

Maverick himself is offered as a vehicle for perceiving military service as a geopolitical equivalent of a football game, cemented by shared signs and gestures, expressions of both team identity and individual triumph. The film’s most famous catchphrase, recited by Maverick and Goose after a gruelling training session and facing down the snootiness of their rivals and bosses, “I feel the need – the need for speed!” is cemented with a high-five, a summation of this fantasising. Maverick and Goose are idealised in the film’s first half as the quintessential pair of wild-and-crazy guys who know how to make a party happen anywhere, with set routines for flirtation and a penchant for sitting at the piano banging on the keys and wailing Jerry Lee Lewis off-key. These moments are a recognisable point of descent for this kind of movie: some of those old flyboy pics I mentioned were directed by Howard Hawks, who was constantly fascinated by the rituals of close-knit groups dealing with specific pressures, and scenes of characters gathered around pianos. And yet the differences are very telling. Top Gun is Hollywood product at its most unrefined, much more the offspring of the desire to sell its star as simultaneously unstoppable and relatable and the producers’ mental check-list of how to ensure that, than it is of any authorial voice. Maverick’s friendship with Goose is positioned purely to impact upon Maverick’s journey. Goose’s death occurs to invest the last act with some emotional weight, and yet its real purpose seems to be to allow Cruise to be photographed in some different emotional registers. Here’s Tom Cruise looking moody. Here’s Tom Cruise still looking great in tighty-whities whilst mourning. Here’s Tom Cruise nobly resolving to lift from the ashes.

Similarly, the rest of the TOPGUN team are barely characterised beyond their postures of general antagonism with Maverick, and their inevitable shift to obeisance before his awesomeness. One of the film’s most famous/infamous vignettes sees Maverick and Goose playing Ice and his RIO Ron ‘Slider’ Kerner (Rossovich) playing a gleefully competitive game of beach volleyball, a moment beloved by many for its unabashed celebration of male physiques attached to charismatic actors. A brief interlude of carefully crafted pizzazz that says nothing about the characters beyond what we already know – they’re young, hot, and macho show-offs – when it might have been crafted to demonstrate the evolving camaraderie and inner natures of the heroes, as another potentially Hawksian moment. All of these are however illustrations of the postures the movie wants the audience to take towards the on-screen elements, and thus exist in a realm closer to advertising than drama, the audience being sold on the need to be/have/watch Maverick. Ice is the only rival graced with solidity, and Kilmer tries to give the character sharp angles of behaviour, particularly when he tries to console Maverick after Goose’s death, as if fighting to pierce a membrane of tension between the two of them. But even he’s essentially a one-dimensional foil, a locker room big-mouth with frosted tips and representative of the onus of establishment judgement. There’s some inherent irony in the casting insofar as Kilmer and Cruise as cast in roles the other might, given their career arcs and general ethos, more reasonably have played.

Top Gun is essentially Star Wars (1977) for jocks, mimicking that film’s essential story arc but removing its mythic element, not just by resituating it in the present day, but by reconfiguring the Luke Skywalker figure – the far-flung dreamer who realises brilliant potential – and substituting a state of already-achieved perfection, a hymn to narcissistic self-appreciation and fuck-I’m-good-just-ask-me posturing. The only quality Maverick needs to learn is humility, which Goose’s death finally instils – he learns to look outside of himself to a voice from beyond. The film plays an interesting game in this regard. The story makes much of Ice’s conviction that Maverick flies dangerously, but when there is a deadly consequence to his flying it’s carefully contrived to not really be his fault, but a by-product of several different forces converging to create a tragedy, of which Maverick and Ice’s competitiveness is only one. Maverick feels responsible because he finally learned he does not have godlike control in the air: he is graced both the gravitas of loss but relieved of the pressure of definite culpability. Maverick’s budding relationship with Charlie is both impaired and given new heat when she criticises one of his risky aerial moves, sparking a show of childishly argumentative behaviour from them both – they careen individually through traffic in their his-and-hers choice of vehicles – that inevitably leads to the sack. I’m sure there are more boring and asinine romances in cinema than that between Maverick and Charlie, but I’m not quite sure where. And yet Scott simply takes that emptiness as an opportunity to unabashedly sell music video-like fantasy, picturing the pair riding around on his Kawasaki and pashing on it in artful magic hour shots, much in the same way that Cruise’s general acting response to his situation is to flash his million-dollar super-cocky grin.

There’s no nice way of saying this – not that I feel any desire to be nice – but Top Gun is not a good film. Certainly from a technical filmmaking viewpoint it’s still mostly impressive, and the sheen of Jeffrey L. Kimball’s photography retains its gorgeous, high-end magazine-shoot gloss. And yet it’s a curiously patchy work that scarcely has a plot, has assemblages in place of characters, and almost dissolves into a succession of shots roughly accumulating into scenes, illustrating a script so shallow it can barely pass muster as a bubblegum wrapper. Nonetheless Top Gun proved a vital pivot and permanent landmark in Tony Scott’s oeuvre, and indeed in recent years the general affection for Tony, following his tragic death in 2012, amongst movie fans who grew up on his big-budget, big-flash movies has begun to rival that being shown for Cruise. The younger brother of Ridley, Scott’s career mimicked his elder sibling’s, graduating from the same art college and moving into advertising at Ridley’s invitation, similarly investing heavily stylised visuals into commercials he directed. After forays into directing television, Scott made his feature filmmaking debut with the 1981 Horror film The Hunger, a movie that bombed at the box office but won some attention for its style, including from Bruckheimer and Simpson, who had begun their rise to eminence in Hollywood by shepherding the successful Flashdance (1983), directed by Adrian Lyne, another flashy Brit talent the duo brought over.

Bruckheimer and Simpson hired Scott for Top Gun, and a lot of the film’s success is certainly owed to his arch use of flourishes like sunset backlighting and delight in gleaming fuselage – both human and aircraft. By contrast with his brother’s woozy ambition and genre-hopping, Scott essentially and happily remained a maker of slick B-movies, investing them with a superficial intensity of look and sound. But I’ve never been able to get on board with the belated Tony Scott cult. Apart from a handful of top-level works like True Romance (1992), Crimson Tide (1995), and Enemy of the State (1998), which were mostly distinguished by relative stylistic restraint, most of Tony’s films represent the glibbest form of chic. The phrase “style over substance” doesn’t quite cut it in summarising Tony’s aesthetic: the substance exists purely to serve the style. Tony’s later movies like Domino (2004) are insufferably gimmicky in their shooting and cutting. The Hunger is the most boring lesbian vampire movie ever made, and whilst it presaged Top Gun in establishing Scott’s comfort with extolling various forms of homoeroticism, it also established his airbrushed approach to such things, wrapping everything in a haute couture glaze. Rather than erotic, it’s a post-sexual world he inhabits, where all things are permitted so long as they have no definable weight and can be made to look really cool. Top Gun does at least move, but there’s a weird jerkiness to its construction, as if the film had a troubled shoot and what we see had to be laboriously patched together (a problem that would become more defined on the production team’s follow-up, Days of Thunder, 1990).

The most effective scenes in the film are its two real character moments, both of which revolve around Maverick’s troubled relationship with his father’s memory. When Maverick tells Charlie about his father’s disappearance, Scott performs a simple, effective tracking shot that slowly moves around Cruise as the actor expertly shifts from laughing nostalgia to musing introspection, a clear signal that Cruise is a performer who knows what he’s doing. Later, Viper takes him for a walk on the beach and explains that he was a part of the mass dogfight that claimed his father’s life, which was hushed up because it “took place on the wrong side of some border,” and assures Maverick his dad really was a hero. This scene certainly gains a lot from Skerritt’s expertise as a grizzled character actor. These flashes of substance are however quickly disposed of. They serve less to tell us that Maverick has psychological issues than to have one of the last impediments to understanding himself as awesome have been removed. The inevitable action climax, in which Maverick is sent out to rescue Ice and others from an ambush by MiGs and saves Ice by shooting down three of the enemy planes, is spectacular stuff in a jumpy sort of way. Where in the training scenes Scott and his filming team do a good job of establishing the relationships of the various aircraft, in the combat the editing turns chaotic. The film’s most truly outstanding element remains the flying, when you can see it properly, which is almost entirely authentic.

Top Gun concludes triumphantly, of course, with Ice and Maverick cemented finally as mutually appreciative if still sardonically rivalrous comrades, and Maverick reuniting with Charlie after she seemed to choose her career over him, whilst Maverick contemplates turning TOPGUN instructor himself. Flashforward to the present day. Top Gun: Maverick has the difficult task of locating any form of seriousness in the inherited material, and its main choice in doing so is to make Goose’s death a cross Maverick has been carrying throughout his 30-plus-year flying career. Maverick is rediscovered working as a test pilot on the Darkstar, a prototype plane that can hopefully go to Mach 10. That’s, like, really fast, yo. When he learns the project is being shut down early by its overseer Rear-Admiral Cain (Ed Harris), Maverick, hoping to save the project and its employees from the scrapheap, takes the plane up and goes for broke, busting Mach 10 before crashing. Maverick earns a customary chewing-out, and it’s made clear he’s never risen above the rank of Captain because of his habits of insubordination, and only has a place in the Navy still thanks to Ice’s protection, as his former rival turned eternal pal is now an Admiral.

Maverick is nonetheless saved once again when, through Ice’s intervention, he’s called to TOPGUN to quickly school a select group of graduates for an extremely dangerous mission: they’re assigned to attack and destroy a clandestine uranium enrichment facility in some other (or the same) unnamed rogue nation, an installation built in a remote and rugged locale and heavily defended to the point that Maverick describes as needing “two miracles” to destroy. Maverick soon has to deal with blasts from the past upon returning to Miramar, most agreeably in the form of Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly), one of his former girlfriends (who is mentioned in a running joke but not glimpsed in the first film) and the daughter of an Admiral who now runs a bar at North Island for pilots. More disturbing is the presence of Goose’s son Lt. Bradley ‘Rooster’ Bradshaw (Miles Teller), who has become a top pilot in spite of Carole’s wish for him not to follow in his father’s footsteps, a wish Maverick hesitantly tried to enforce by failing to recommend him for the Naval Academy when it was in his power. Maverick also chafes under the watchful eye of the Naval Air Forces honcho ‘Cyclone’ Simpson (Jon Hamm), who has no time for Maverick’s loose cannon antics, dammit.

Perhaps taking some heed of how angrily many fans took to the borderline contemptuous use of the classic Star Wars heroes in the new Disney-backed trilogy, and perhaps also thanks to Cruise’s ever-rigorous grip on how to manage his screen image, Top Gun: Maverick resists making sport of its hero’s condition of arrested development. When, in the opening minutes, Maverick is glimpsed sweeping the canvas cover off his old Kawasaki and dashing across the desert to work like he’s still the same flashy kid he was in the original, it’s not to service any humour but for the audience to delight in the way Cruise-as-Maverick still embodies their fantasies – in this case to still act like a 24-year-old when you’re pushing 60. Top Gun: Maverick’s most vital theme nonetheless quickly proves to revolve around fear of obsolescence, as Maverick stares down his last real chance to make a mark in the Navy. Maverick’s opening escapade is very obviously based on The Right Stuff, and director Joseph Kosinski acknowledges the model by casting Harris. Cain is nicknamed “The Drone Ranger” and wants to shut down the Darkstar specifically to channel its funding into his drone warfare projects, an offence to any self-respecting, old-school warrior. Thus, the onus of hierarchical command’s paternalistic authority and sometimes blind verdicts Maverick faced in the first film is here also conflated with the threat of the new, a newness that’s blandly impersonal, technocratic, and, well, just plain unmanly.

Not that piloting is strictly a manly business anymore: Maverick’s trainee squad also includes female pilots Natasha ‘Phoenix’ Trace (Monica Barbaro) and Callie ‘Halo’ Bassett (Kara Wang), as well as the braggart  Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin (Glen Powell, stealing scenes with his smugly louche alpha act), whose rivalry with Rooster echoes Maverick’s with Ice. Hangman is more of a provocateur and bully than either of them were: Phoenix comments dryly that his call-sign stems from his habit of leaving his comrades “hanging out to dry” in tough situations. There’s even a dorky non-alpha named Bob – just Bob (Lewis Pullman) – who serves as Phoenix’s RIO. Throughout their training Rooster’s resentment of Maverick clashes with Maverick’s fear of sending Rooster off to his death, compounding the Bradshaw family tragedy. Hangman eventually catches wind of Rooster’s spurring loss, which also purposefully echoes Maverick’s in the first film. The film hits many of same basic story beats as the original, even going so far as to have Maverick sent on his way to TOPGUN by a bald character actor, before entering into some deliberate doppelganger moments, building to a strong vignette as Penny notices Maverick staring into the bar with a stricken look whilst Rooster within bangs out “Great Balls of Fire” on the piano for his pals just as his father used to. Arguably this is going a few steps too far in positing Rooster as a chip off the old block, considering he was an infant in the original film, but of course it gives both Maverick and the audience familiar with it a hot dose of instant nostalgic connection.

Top Gun: Maverick keeps in mind lessons from some of the more successful extensions of venerable franchises or “legacequels” of recent years. There are detectable likeness to Rocky Balboa (2006) and Creed (2014), Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), and Kosinski’s own Tron: Legacy (2011), from which it repeats the idea of positing a generational interchange as, basically, a father-son tale. This is one of the best aspects of Top Gun: Maverick, but also an exasperating one, as the film avoids giving much information about just what kind of relationship Maverick and Rooster had as the young man grew up. Their relationship is also defined in a way that resembles the original film in skipping around the issue of responsibility: Rooster’s anger at Maverick for holding him back is used as a stand-in for the audience’s awareness of Maverick’s role in Goose’s death whilst also dismissing that as a lingering issue. The film also generally still exists to affirm Cruise as the fount of all awesomeness. When the hat is tipped to the original’s volleyball scene as Maverick and his students play football on the beach together, it’s mostly to draw the viewer’s admiration for how good Cruise’s physique is still, rather than celebrate those of any potential replacements, and Kosinski avoids filming with the same soft-core sheen that Scott so readily indulged.

Kosinski is one of the more interesting talents to break into big-budget filmmaking in the past decade or so. He started off as a would-be screenwriter but gained attention working with CGI on advertisements and cutscenes for video games, developing a fine eye, a sleek sense of style and function, but also emerging as a film director with a good feel for actors. He’s more classical and has a finer touch than Scott ever had – he cares that Cruise and Connelly seem to really get along on camera where in the original Cruise and McGillis seemed to be thrown together because of their clashing eye hues and bone structures. But he also lacks the fetishistic clamminess that clung to Scott’s imagery, the quality that, for better or worse, defined Scott as a premiere Dream Factory stylist. Scott’s film also belonged to an era when filmmaking was strongly attuned to physicality, which Scott took to typically hyperbolic lengths by coating just about every actor in sweat to catch all the lighting hues but also give the impression these are guys feeling extremes at all times. Top Gun: Maverick by contrast has no such feel for hothouse climes. Kosinski links his shots together better than Scott, but lacks his pictorial intensity. Kosinski settles for reproducing the opening of Top Gun in his edition, down to the backlit crew and planes and playing “Highway To The Danger Zone” on the soundtrack, as if this isn’t some epic years-later revisiting but maybe the first or second imaginary sequel that might have come down the pipeline in the late ‘80s if Cruise had been so inclined. Perhaps if I was more nostalgic for the first film this would pinion me with Pavlovian sense-memory, but apart from mildly liking the song it doesn’t have that leverage over me. This sort of thing is instantly reassuring to fans but it also signals just how derivative and unimaginative this take is going to be. The film doesn’t even have some of the eccentric qualities Kosinski invested in the generally underrated and trend-setting Tron: Legacy.

Similarly, Top Gun: Maverick also reproduces the original in failing to sketch the members of the pilots beyond a couple of basic traits. Kosinski tried his best to invest a definably Hawksian sensibility in his firefighter drama Only The Brave (2017) through portraying group dynamics in difficult, cut-above jobs: he failed – who wouldn’t? – but it was a nice try. He makes a similar play here, introducing the pilots in the trainee team in a lengthy sequence in Penny’s bar as they josh and jibe, compete and party. This sequence is also clever in the way it remixes Maverick’s meeting with Charlie in the original, with the young pilots mistaking Maverick for just another old fart, only to cringe when he strides out before them at TOPGUN. But despite Kosinski’s best efforts everyone remains locked into their specific, generic functions, barely fleshed out or given characteristics, except for Hangman, whose preordained act of redemptive rescue is both delivered with a dash of humour and again tips its hat to Maverick’s role in the original’s climax. And that’s ultimately both what distinguishes and hampers Top Gun: Maverick. Whilst it’s both much more of a real movie than its predecessor, it’s also a simple, straightforward, unambitious one. That sort of thing can be a relief in today’s blockbuster zone filled with multiverses and cross-promotional tie-ins, and it’s plain by the general, initial reaction it’s proven exactly that for many.

Still, I can’t help but wonder when the mass audience became so undemanding. Despite being a paean to unruly willpower, there’s nothing of the like to the film’s crisply ordered, very familiar plot progression, nor anything daring about its approach to its characters and their stories. Where the original at least made gestures towards complicating its morality and destabilising the aura of its hero before reconfirming it, Top Gun: Maverick only goes through the motions of character conflict. Maverick’s calls this time are far more insubordinate than they were in the first film but the movie assures us they’re the right ones (even in the opening vignette where he destroys a multimillion-dollar aircraft). His skirmishes with Rooster are ultimately straw-dummy headbutting. Maverick’s relationship with Rooster is essentially the same as his with Penny – they knew each-other back when, they’ve been through some stuff, and despite the superficial spurning and sparring they all still like each-other, and we don’t have to go to any effort making them connect. Those connections are just there.

Cruise and Connelly bring a decent level of chemistry to their scenes together, convincingly portraying a couple who have been around the block a few times but still have the fire of their younger selves guttering within. Kosinski works in some amusing flourishes that give some flickers of life: Penny takes Maverick out on her yacht and has to teach him basic seamanship despite him being the career Navy man, and later he has to sneak out of her bedroom to avoid giving the game away too early to Penny’s teenage daughter Amelia (Lyliana Wray), only to drop down directly before her expectant gaze and stern warning, “Don’t break her heart again.” None of this escapes the bonds of a standard-issue C-plot romance, and the scene where Penny consoles Maverick through a crisis of confidence feels like it copy-and-pasted from the script of Rocky Balboa, which also dug up an obscure character from the franchise opener to serve as the fill-in for a previous love interest. The film’s best scenes are calculated in divergent ways. The first comes when Maverick goes to visit Ice, who, like the actor playing him, has been debilitated and left almost voiceless by cancer. Maverick confesses his worries and doubts to his old comrade and defender, who tells him by computer that “it’s time to let go” when it comes to Rooster, and then huskily pronounces, “The Navy needs Maverick – the kid needs Maverick.” It’s virtually impossible not to be moved by this, even given what stick-figures the actors played in the original. Part of the new gravitas comes from time and affection for these two actors who remind us for good or ill that more time has passed since the original than anyone involved would care to remember.

Kilmer’s strength as an actor still glows under the ashes of illness, his bond with Cruise has a genuine feel, and the scene ends with a deft flash of audience-tickling humour when Ice then prods Maverick with the question “Who’s the better pilot, you or me?” and Maverick responds dryly, “This is a nice moment, let’s not ruin it.” Later in the film Ice dies from his illness, leaving Maverick defenceless before the military hierarchy, but he decides to take another risk after Cyclone decides to dump him and try a more conservative approach to the raid when it seems no-one can traverse the twisting terrain in the necessary span of time to avoid detection on the impending bomb run. Maverick takes a plane and puts all his piloting legerdemain on the line to prove it can be done, convincing Cyclone that only he can effectively lead the team into battle. This sequence is certainly on point, exploiting both the sophistication of the aerial photography and flying and the straightforward rah-rah of seeing the old hero get his mojo back and prove the world still bends before the awesomeness of Maverick. The actual bomb run proves almost a little too straightforward, despite the inevitable little foul-ups like failing laser guidance that requires so old-fashioned down-home shooting skill.

Both Top Gun movies are inarguably about celebrating the legend of American military strength. The first film, famously, generated a 500% spike in applications to become pilots. The narrative through-line of both movies, whilst preoccupied with Maverick as, well, a maverick, his arts nonetheless simply make him the apex predator in this kind of warfare. But the movies’ pitch also comes with the curious caveat that it is above all just that, a legend. That military strength is rendered a trope, as inconsequential in its way as the realities of Charlemagne’s empire to the stories of Roland or Dark Age Britain to the Arthurian Knights, or the Bengal Lancers in some 1930s Hollywood-made film extolling British imperialism. The abstraction of the enemy in both films, with their menacing black aircraft and face-covering helmets, underlines this legendary conception, even as it also highlights a worrying aspect of military thinking. The “enemy” becomes an amorphous thing, detached from all geopolitical immediacies, turning politics and war into an eternal duel pivoting from foe to foe. Both movies tap tension in anxiety that American military capability isn’t really that much – the MiGs in the first film and the “fifth generation” enemy fighters in the sequel are both described as being formidable and more sophisticated than the US fighter planes – and it’s the calibre of people flying them is what really counts. In the original Top Gun the enemy starts shooting first, and the American pilots are forced to fight for their lives, placing them not only in an underdog position but also in the right. In Top Gun: Maverick they’re engaged in a covert operation and pre-emptive strike.

The potential repercussions of this, and how the pilots feel about it, could be very interesting, but aren’t investigated at all. “Don’t think, just feel,” Maverick instructs Rooster and the rest of the team, which is supposed to relate purely to the required surrender to pure instinct in the heat of jet-powered flying, but also describes every other aspect of their roles. Ours not to reason why, etc. The similarity of Top Gun: Maverick’s basic plot to a host of older war movies is also hard to miss. The bombing run is closest in nature to Mark Robson’s The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1953), and indeed it’s basically the same film, down to Maverick getting shot down after successfully completing the seemingly impossible mission. Except that where Robson took a risk and kept the downbeat ending of James Michener’s source novel in which both pilot hero and his would-be rescuers were shot dead, Kosinski sets up the same situation but delivers crowd-pleasing stuff. Rooster returns to save Maverick from a helicopter that pursues him across the snowy wasteland, only to be shot down himself, forcing the duo to make their way across country together.

Teller, not an actor I’ve felt much liking for thus far in his career, proves surprisingly effective in his role, as far as it goes. With a scruffy moustache he looks enough like Edwards but with a slightly burlier, overcompensating edge. His interactions with Cruise are however more stated than felt. The last portion of the film sees Maverick and Rooster trekking across the snow-crusted landscape and electing to steal a vintage, surplus F-14 from a hanger bay. As far as fan-pleasing touches go this is again pretty good, setting up a finale that wrings excitement from this twist, as Maverick has to not just outfly but outthink two far more modern and formidable opponents in the ultimate dramatization of his career doldrums. But the situations are robbed of what should be some of their tense and immediate impact by the blankness of the setting and the absence of enemy soldiers. It remains as bland and plastic and straightforward as a mid-2000s video game. Which is a significant lack considering that what distinguishes Top Gun: Maverick up until this point is the remarkable beauty and immediacy of the flying sequences, which mostly eschew special effects enhancement as much as the first film and indeed go a few steps further, utilising the cutting-edge camerawork and lensing to show the audience the cast in the planes, and giving a potent sense of the thrills and dangers of weaving a path up a narrow gorge in a plane going hundreds of miles an hour.

The visual drama and immediacy of the flying and filming throughout have been immediately celebrated by viewers and critics alike, and it feels like it could be an important moment in the history of current big-budget cinema, if anyone cares to learn the lesson. At the very least, Top Gun: Maverick is, quite genuinely, an islet of old-school cinema values: putting good-looking people on screen and having them do interesting, spectacular things – an essentialist approach to making popular cinema going back to Pearl White. For all the advancing sophistication of CGI-era cinema, the human eye retains a capacity to tell what’s real from what’s bogus, as Hollywood has begun using its computers as a catch-all for all its efforts, but Kosinski and his crew and actors provide ample evidence that approach to making movies need not be the whole future. Top Gun: Maverick also manages the rare feat of improving enormously on a facile precursor and using it as a solid template, which might well be because that template in turn is rooted in primeval Hollywood lore, however bastardised. Top Gun: Maverick aims to summarise and provide apotheosis for Cruise as a star, but it does so in a manner that confirms just how much of the star’s ambition has waned, and how much the audience expects of him, taking this mostly bland, efficient, solid programmer as some sort of grand return.