Review of ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ — the Most Entertaining Propaganda I’ve Ever Watched
A Totally Reel Movie Review
Rate It Out of Eight
6.5 /8
I was skeptical when I first heard about Top Gun: Maverick’s Memorial Day box office record. That new Tom Cruise movie with airplanes? How thrilling can sitting in airplanes be? Without explosions, car chases, and interdimensional monsters? Turns out, it can deliver just as much thrill, if not more.
Top Gun: Maverick is a family-friendly movie that has something for everyone. There’s beautiful cinematography of snow-capped mountains, aerial combat fighting, an age-appropriate romantic interest, and just enough parallels to the 1986 Top Gun to invoke nostalgia. And not to mention Tom Cruise, charming as ever even as he nears 60. Miles Teller as well as the rest of the cast also have great performances, adding emotional depth and comedic relief in between action sequences. It’s even more impressive once you learn that all the aerial maneuvers were practical effects — Cruise and the cast sat behind pilots in the plane and kept flying until they got the perfect shot. The movie’s a great start to the summer movie season and may well be the peak at least until the new Thor movie breaks box office records (regardless of how bad Marvel’s recent misses are).
Propaganda Never Looked So Glamorous
Let’s not avoid the elephant in the room: this movie glorifies military life. It’s no secret that the Pentagon has ties to Hollywood, lending military equipment and reviewing movie scripts. The protagonist, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell has been in the navy since the events of the original Top Gun movie and almost every character in the movie is either an officer or a civilian with personal ties. There is no obvious villain other than enemy soldiers of an unnamed country, which makes it easier for the movie to glorify all the American characters as the “good guys” putting their lives on the line to protect their country.
Before we dive deeper, let’s review some of the history of the original Top Gun movie. In it, the enemy aircrafts also belonged to an unnamed nation, but considering 1986 was still during the Cold War, audiences can easily infer who the “bad guys” were. On screen, we see the heroism and worship of Tom Cruise’s Maverick who not only single handedly shoots down three enemy aircrafts (the first man in 40 years to do so, we’re reminded in the sequel), but wins the favor of his beautiful instructor despite her initial resistance. It’s no surprise that the navy’s enlistment numbers increased 500% after the movie came out. Who wouldn’t want to be Tom Cruise, flying through the skies with a beautiful woman to boot. There’s a dramatic contrast between military life portrayed in Top Gun and in later war movies like Saving Private Ryan, where the D-Day sequence was gritty, gory, and grotesque. The military needed this PR campaign and young men ate it up since the U.S. was no longer involved in direct combat (the Vietnam War ended about 10 years before the movie came out).
Fast forward to 2022, Top Gun: Maverick is overall a much better film, which makes it even more compelling as military propaganda. Maverick himself is a personification of American ideals; it’s in the name. He’s rebellious, smart, practical, and also big-hearted with nothing but good intentions. He breaks the rules but is never actually punished. Spoiler alert: the movie has a triumphant ending, making it a feel-good sports movie with big big planes.
Individual Rights vs. the Common Good
Maverick as a character has developed a lot since the original movie. In the 1986 movie, he often isolated his fellow Top Gun classmates and made rash decisions that endangered Goose, his partner. In the sequel, he emphasizes the importance of team work to his students, forcing them to play football together to develop those sorely needed collaboration skills. The 2022 movie is more cautious when promoting the “maverick,” lone-wolf combat strategy. It’s a nuanced glorification of individuality that reminds viewers not to forget about the impact of your actions on others around you. Although the movie was filmed before 2020, the message is eerily similar to many debates around public health.
One of the young pilots Hangman, who’s supposedly nicknamed that because he’ll leave you hanging during a mission, is an obvious personification of this moral. In the beginning, he’s cocky and an asshole, ready to use Rooster’s personal affairs as a weapon to secure a spot for himself on the team that goes on this deadly mission. During training, he speeds up and leaves his teammates behind, essentially leaving them to die in the simulated mission. He justifies that “he couldn’t keep up” because after all, why should he let others drag him down. By the end, he’s learned some humility and saved Rooster and Maverick’s lives. There’s a great shot of him and Rooster shaking hands, a clear parallel to Iceman and Maverick in the 1986 film. Perhaps these are hints for future movies in the franchise following the adventures of the younger pilots.
The Sequel Pays Homage and Does Everything Better
At the end of the original Top Gun movie, Maverick’s partner Goose dies in an accident during training, leaving behind a young son who grows up to be Rooster. Miles Teller brings emotional depth and maturity to his character as we see him tackle his mixed feelings towards Maverick and eventually move past his resentment. There’s no shortage of touching, emotional moments between the two of them. Maverick never fully moved on from the pain of Goose’s death and it’s something that bonds the two together. They have a great father/son dynamic and even bring a moment of comic relief in the middle of two tense action sequences (iykyk).
There are plenty of cinematic parallels to the 1986 original throughout the movie. For example, when Maverick can’t afford to pay for everyone’s drink at a local bar after breaking one of its rules, he gets thrown out by a couple of his soon-to-be students. The next morning, the sheepish looks on their faces as Maverick marches towards the front of the room, introduced as their instructor, is an obvious recreation of the classic scene with Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis, who he shamelessly flirted with before finding out she was his instructor.
Speaking of romance, let’s take a moment to appreciate that Tom Cruise is finally acting with an age-appropriate romantic lead. This seems to be the first time Hollywood acknowledges an action star’s age, instead of pairing him with a 30-year-old bombshell like the parade of Bond women. Perhaps Mission Impossible 7 will jump back to that trend. Jennifer Connelly is older than the typical love interest in action movies and it’s great to see a beautiful woman on screen, especially with the way society (and especially the movie industry) discards women as they age.
Jennifer Connelly plays Penny, who (in my opinion) was done dirty by the writers. She represents stability for Maverick, who has no children or spouse. She isn’t given much background other than some allusions to their past and she comes off as a fairly one-dimensional character who is there to anchor Maverick. Jennifer Connelly gives a great performance with what she’s given, and there’s a touching scene before the mission when Maverick is in his white uniform and sits with her watching the sunset. She is what he is coming home to. She is what he’s fighting for. The original Top Gun movie had so much romance to the point that it felt like a romance movie with some aerial combat on the side. This movie is much more focused on the mission with some romance in between.
Personally I thought the biggest improvement between the two movies is the sequel’s ability to create a high-stakes mission. The first movie goes at a slow, ambling place with no ultimate end goal other than graduation from Top Gun and perhaps some competition for the trophy. The sequel establishes from the beginning the exact flight path of the mission to bomb enemy weapons and Maverick reviews a simulation of it so many times that by the time the actual mission comes around, viewers know exactly what to cheer for. It’s a trope taken from heist movies and pays off well in this one. It’s easy to get swept along and cheer for the pilots after watching them practice, struggle, and fail during their training and to watch them finally pull of a near-impossible mission.
The first movie had a lighter tone and often downplayed the dangers of their profession until Goose’s death. In the sequel, Maverick constantly reminds audiences that very real possibility. He grills his students on why they failed their simulation and reminds them to “tell that to [your teammate’s] families at their funeral.” It’s a verbal slap in the face and further ups the stakes. Multiple characters have explicitly stated that success depends on a number of miracles to destroy the weapons; coming back home alive would be another.
Who Says the Original is Always Better
Top Gun: Maverick is a feel-good movie to kick off the summer. It’s as good as everyone has been saying it is and certainly deserves the 98% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. While it’s glorifying the military to the point of propaganda, I don’t mind because the movie was just that enjoyable from beginning to end. The 1986 movie was cringey, poorly written, and a pain to sit through. The 2022 one is incredible to witness on the big screen. Tom Cruise personally fought to keep the movie from going straight to streaming during the pandemic and his gamble paid off. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, do yourself a favor and go see it on the biggest screen you can find.
Letterboxd Reviews
And for my favorite part, some Letterboxd reviews for your entertainment:
And my personal favorite…
