Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell finds himself training a detachment of TOP GUN graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen.
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80 films that influenced Top Gun: Maverick
What critics say influenced Top Gun: Maverick
Director Joseph Kosinski ( TRON: Legacy , Oblivion ) has studied the first film with an electron microscope, and a series of writers that includes star Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible collaborator Christopher McQuarrie (as well as Ehren Kruger and Eric Warren Singer) have pieced together a story that beat-for-beat matches sequences and character types of the original to a degree that it’s somewhat alarming.
Although having almost fifty credits to his name, it is arguably the combination of his roles as Mission Impossible ’s Ethan Hunt and Maverick that are most synonymous with the actor.
This time he brought onboard his Mission: Impossible partner Christopher McQuarrie and it’s a sequel that outdoes the original, in some part because of how playfully and emotionally it handles the nostalgia and inherent silliness of the concept.
He brought Mission: Impossible a sophistication and elegance reminiscent of the James Bond movies at their best, without losing the fun.
It’s a long shot, if the details of the operation—explained to the aviator hopefuls in a rather “It can’t be done” style reminiscent of “Mission: Impossible”—are any indication.
The film opens with a sequence in which Maverick is testing an aircraft to its very limits in a way that kind of reminded me of Damien Chazelle’s First Man, and the film ends with the exhilarating mission that the TOPGUN training has been leading up to, and it is executed with the kind of heart-in-your-throat intensity that made the sequence feel like it could’ve easily been at home in a Mission: Impossible film.
Aside from fighting female Phoenix (Barbaro, of TV’s “The Good Cop,” “Stumptown,” etc) reminding us that the Navy’s not just a boy’s club any more, this “boy’s club” engages in the same camaraderie, hijinks and pilots’ piano bar sing-alongs that every fighter pilot movie since “Hell’s Angels” has showcased.
Sophisticated movie magic makes their performances seamless with the exterior airborne shots, while the commitment to filming practically everything practically feels like the cutting-edge equivalent of Howard Hughes’ history-making “Hell’s Angels.”
Most militaries are moving away from using human pilots and into drones, so it’s not a coincidence that when Maverick begins his first lesson, he stands in front of an American flag as inspirationally as George C. Scott did to win his Oscar in “Patton.”
Top Gun: Maverick , though it may draw on memories of unrivalled American hegemony, is really harking back to the era of star-led genre filmmaking that started in the mid-1980s, with Beverly Hills Cop and Top Gun , gathered pace with Die Hard and ended around 2000, the last time the year’s biggest film wasn’t animated, computer-generated or fantastical.
Nobody supposes the belated fourth installments in the Indiana Jones or Die Hard franchises will live up to the standards set by their predecessors.
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Cruise delivers echoes of Harrison Ford’s phenomenal reprisal in Blade Runner 2049 .
The first was “Blade Runner 2049,” in which an old relic is pulled out of retirement by a handsome young man doing his same job because only the relic (who abandoned his family as a purported act of love) has the skills to save the universe.
(That 36-year gap puts it high on the list of longest time elapsed between a movie and its follow-up, up there with the 35 years between "Blade Runner" and "Blade Runner 2049," but not as much as the 54 years between "Mary Poppins" and "Mary Poppins Returns."
Star Trek (2009) , Creed (2015) , Star Wars: Das Erwachen der Macht (2015), Blade Runner 2049 (2017) etc.: Die zunehmende Tendenz Hollywoods, alte Kultfilme upzudaten, hat anscheinend nach einem Begriff verlangt.
We meet Ed Harris in a small role as Maverick’s superior channeling his best subdued Robert Duvall from Apocalypse Now impersonation.
Scott, who was long attached to return to direct a sequel before he died in 2012, drenched his opening sequence in an unreal smoky yellow color, almost as if it were a scene out of "Apocalypse Now."
This is on par with the mouth-agape practicality and wonder of Mad Max: Fury Road , if a hard-on wasn’t an appropriate frame of reference.
Top Gun: Maverick joins Ryan Coogler's Creed, George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road, and Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi as the best sequel/reboots arriving decades after the original.
It’s an outrageously entertaining picture, boasting some of the most exquisitely choreographed action sequences since “Mad Max: Fury Road” and a bruised-but-not-broken heart worn brazenly on its sleeve.
It’s no surprise early praise for Maverick has seen comparisons with Mad Max: Fury Road , another of the century’s best action films.
Harold Faltermeyer, who also created the iconic theme music for Beverly Hills Cop, returns as the composer for Top Gun: Maverick.
Top Gun: Maverick , though it may draw on memories of unrivalled American hegemony, is really harking back to the era of star-led genre filmmaking that started in the mid-1980s, with Beverly Hills Cop and Top Gun , gathered pace with Die Hard and ended around 2000, the last time the year’s biggest film wasn’t animated, computer-generated or fantastical.
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Instead, they’ve drawn inspiration from WWII-era classics like Air Force and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo , grounding their ensemble in authentic human emotions and giving them inner lives beyond what happens to them in the cockpit.
Instead, they’ve drawn inspiration from WWII-era classics like Air Force and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo , grounding their ensemble in authentic human emotions and giving them inner lives beyond what happens to them in the cockpit.