Film Review

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

After 30 years, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is recalled to TOPGUN fighter training school to prepare the country’s top aviators for a dangerous mission...

My dad was in the Royal Air Force. Not as a pilot, but he always loved aviation and learned to fly light aircraft. I have distinct memories of him renting Top Gun (1986) numerous times and re-playing the opening sequence — set to Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” — until the tape wore thin. In the 1980s, before the internet, there wasn’t easy access to footage of fighter jets screaming off aircraft carriers, so you could only really see F-14s in the rare TV documentary, which wouldn’t have the production value of a $15M Tony Scott movie.

I didn’t share my dad’s passion for planes, but Top Gun will always have a place in my heart as something I associate with him. He died of cancer 10 years ago. Top Gun: Maverick was released on what would have been his 66th birthday. I saw it without him during a weekend of family reflection about his life, and when “Danger Zone” once again played over the opening scene, I was suddenly a…