Early on in Top Gun: Maverick (2022), we see Tom Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell rushing to take off in an experimental, hypersonic plane he’s been working on with his fellow Navy comrades. The program, which he learned a few hours ago, is being scrapped; Rear Admiral Chester Cain (Ed Harris) would rather allocate funds to unmanned drones than Maverick’s pet project. Nevertheless, Maverick is determined to take off and exceed Mach 10, saving the project in the process.
Before he takes off, Mav’s friend Hondo (Bashir Salahuddin) says, “It’s not too late to stop, buddy. You know what happens to you if you go through with this.” Maverick responds, “I know what happens to everyone else if I don’t.” As the entire team looks onward at their savior, Maverick takes off, pushing the plane to Mach 10 and beyond — until it blows up, that is.
Maverick’s insistence — that he has to push the limits in order to save everyone that depends on him — illustrates Tom Cruise’s four-decade-long quest to save cinema, one that began in 1986’s Top Gun, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Tony Scott’s classic saw a young, arrogant Cruise battle for the soul of an industry via wild, bold tactics that, while effective, are too extreme for anyone else to replicate. Thirty-some years later, Top Gun: Maverick takes on the battle for a different era; Pete is wiser and older, even if he hasn’t gained rank in years because of his unruly antics.
Now, though, Maverick’s mission is different. No longer is he flying to chase his father’s ghost, but he’s flying to race against the past itself. As a legacy sequel and a meta-narrative on legacy, Maverick interrogates the status of an established legend working to mentor a new generation during a crisis that threatens the future.
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Scott’s Top Gun, Paramount re-released both films to select theaters, allowing audiences to experience the “need for speed” once more. For Maverick, especially, the theatrical experience is key; back at the time of Maverick’s release, viewers were met with a pre-screening welcome message from Cruise, who promised the most “immersive, authentic film experience we could make.” “We all made it for you,” he said, thanking the audience for showing up to a theater during a pandemic.
It’s easy to forget, yet I recall when Top Gun: Maverick, originally slated for release in the summer of 2019, was viewed with a hefty dose of skepticism. Paramount continually pushed back the film’s release date as the pandemic raged, leaving it in an odd limbo until it was released in the summer of 2022. Once it hit theaters, though, it was easy to understand why. Cruise’s promise of the “immersive, authentic film experience we could make” rang true; Maverick is a triumph of modern blockbuster action filmmaking, an absolute barn-burner that somehow manages to pull on your heartstrings while sending them racing.
It’s funny, though, that this year’s anniversary is for Top Gun, not its decades-later sequel. Instead of just re-releasing the original film, Paramount felt that they might as well release the entire Top Gun text. In my eyes, the original Top Gun is fine as a film, yet a fascinating topic of conversation — its queer coding alone is worthy of an entire article (I mean, c’mon, that volleyball scene!). Maverick, though, is a far superior film, its emotional beats, central relationships, and Mach 10 action all working on a different echelon from Top Gun.
What stands out most when revisiting these movies as one experience, though, is how the ideas each film introduces have evolved over time, each revolving around the stardom and heroic imagery of Tom Cruise, certified Hollywood movie star™.
In Top Gun, Maverick is, to be frank, an arrogant ass. In the air, he flies like a bat out of hell, even if he’s exceptionally talented. He hits on Charlie (Kelly McGillis) with undeniably creepy forwardness, going so far as to burst into the women’s bathroom to talk to her. Maverick’s arrogance is the heart of his brilliance, which directly differs from the cold, calculated precision of his rival, Iceman (Val Kilmer).
Top Gun’s central narrative focus is on this battle between Maverick’s risky genius and Iceman’s textbook technique. Iceman contends that Maverick is dangerous and unsafe; Maverick takes pride in his danger. The film paints Maverick — and, in so doing, Cruise — as a genius loose cannon, someone who perhaps means well yet is insane. The question is: Is his heart in it?
Top Gun tests this question, primarily through Goose’s (Anthony Edwards) death. Goose’s death was Maverick’s ultimate “test,” the greatest obstacle he’s had to overcome. Even if flying will never be the same without Goose, Pete can’t escape the sky.
The construction of Maverick — from the question of whether his “heart is in it,” to his wild genius, to his emotional core hidden by a suave exterior — is directly indicative of the construction of Cruise’s stardom, which constantly plays up his other-worldliness so as to make everyone forget about his controversy as a prominent Scientologist.
By bringing Top Gun to a new generation through Maverick, the film paints a different picture of a legend who is threatened with being left in the past. While still arrogant, chaotic, and insane, Pete is older and wiser. Now, it’s time for him to “let go,” as Iceman tells him in one of Maverick’s most emotional scenes — both for its in-narrative story and its meta-narrative around Kilmer’s health.
In Maverick, the battle shifts from Maverick’s risky genius vs Iceman’s calculation to Maverick’s battle against an impending future. He must teach a new generation of fighters — all played by a “new generation” of movie stars, from Glen Powell to Miles Teller to Lewis Pullman — how to think like Maverick; it’s his job to teach this new generation the right way, the Cruise way. His way, he says, is extremely difficult and risky, yet also the most noble: the only way everyone can complete the mission and come home safe.
Top Gun: Maverick, then, works to interrogate the legacy left behind by its star, asking if “his” way can survive in an increasingly technological era. Cruise’s quest to save cinema comes to light. The industry he established via risky genius in Top Gun is now in crisis, so he must work through his past demons to “let go of the past” and forge a new future for a new era. This emotional North Star is the defining characteristic of late-era Tom Cruise: his self-appointed quest to save cinema amid a shifting industrial landscape.
It’s no coincidence that this late-era Cruise comes as the Hollywood industry accelerates through an increasingly technological evolution behind-the-scenes. Artificial intelligence is being forced into every sector of the industry; the theatrical mode is at risk as streaming services grow stronger; power is being funneled into the hands of increasingly fewer conglomerates, including Paramount itself.
Cruise, as one of Hollywood’s few remaining true-blue movie stars, takes it upon himself to, through his movies, “save” the industry. His mission is to, through practical, passionate, and boundary-pushing filmmaking methods, fight against a tide of change — or, at least, it’s a good marketing pitch. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (2022) and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025), after all, are quite literally about a technological “god” taking over the world, threatening to leave Ethan Hunt/Cruise and his flesh-and-blood team in the dust.
Late-era Cruise has become obsessed with his own branding, each of his films working to reassert his image, talent, and heroism. By now, it’s a part of his brand. After all, Maverick asserts that, even after weeks of intense training, Mav is still the best option as mission leader. Cruise’s films are stamped with Tom Cruise authenticity, signaling to his audience that they can expect an immortal star who will evoke a nostalgic version of Hollywood filmmaking. He, himself, made this phenomenon visible in a leaked on-set rant in Dead Reckoning: “That’s what I sleep with every night – the future of this fucking industry.”
Understanding Cruise’s self-appointed quest to save “the future of this fucking industry,” then, offers a lens to understand Top Gun: Maverick — and last week’s double re-release — as a battle for the soul of the film industry. Its action is physical and propulsive, reminding its theatrical audience of the power of experiential cinema. Its narrative interest in training a new generation of fighters might as well slap you in the face with its allegorical interest.
Maverick — an established legend grappling with his past while trying to convince his superiors that having a human in the cockpit is essential — is Cruise — an established legend reasserting his past while trying to convince his superiors that having a human on screen and behind the scenes is essential.
Top Gun, even at 40, is a welcome kind of American cheese; it lays everything on thick and melts fast, oozing American exceptionalism, hyper-masculinity, and formulaic genre convention. Yet it is so engaging that it’s easy to leave that all in the background while you awe over a bunch of hot dudes flying fast planes. Top Gun: Maverick brings that American cheese to a new era, ultimately recreating its militaristic exceptionalism and hyper-masculinity while battling for the soul of an industry that looks very different from 1986’s.
Together, though, they paint a picture of a decades-long quest of a legend, asserting that his chaos, his risky genius, is ultimately an altruistic effort to save his industry. In Top Gun, Pete flies to chase down the ghost of his dead father; in Top Gun: Maverick, he flies to outrun the ghosts of a past that he can’t let go.
Cruise, meanwhile, works to catch the ghost of a Hollywood that is no longer.
Article Courtesy of Carson Burton
Feature Image Credit to Paramount Pictures