Nostalgia for ’80s pop and the U.S. military counter Hollywood orthodoxy.
The timing of the Top Gun: Maverick sequel couldn’t be stranger. Delayed by the Covid lockdown, it greets a comic-book movie audience that wasn’t even born when the first “I feel the need / the need for speed” movie opened in 1986 and cemented Tom Cruise’s stardom. The action-movie franchise features military guts, glory, and ingenuity that run counter to Hollywood’s support of the current regime’s anger and humiliation — so much so that the film’s mindless rah-rah mechanisms could almost be mistaken for America First pride. My guess is that the patriotic disguise is hollow and that the inane, formulaic Maverick is a test.
Tom Cruise re-ups in the role of hotshot naval aviator Captain Pete Mitchell, inevitably bringing it weathered maturity. No longer a brash, callow youth, Mitchell, with his still-eager grin, shows the furrows of age and experience — and the moral sincerity of Cruise’s memorable late performances, especially Minority Report and The War of the Worlds. Too arrogant for the military’s brass (“You should at least be a two-star admiral by now, or at least a senator”), Mitchell also invokes what we know about a pop star’s personal travails and career persistence.
Scenes between Mitchell and the disdainful Admiral Simpson (Jon Hamm) are culturally enlightening — boyish Cruise is a star; five-o’clock-shadow Hamm, from Mad Men, is TV trite. We root for Mitchell’s perseverance as if that itself is success. After a stupidly rousing flight sequence where Mitchell disobeys command and breaks Mach 10, he’s demoted to teaching a new generation of recruits everything he knows about flying, fighting, and comradeship. These old-fashioned qualities (cheered-on by token black bit players) are as contrived as the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Following Hollywood’s sequelitis, Maverick virtually repeats the plot of the first Top Gun. But director Joseph Kosinski doesn’t just replicate Tony Scott’s emphatic superficiality. Everything is streamlined: the flying action; Mitchell’s reacquaintance with Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly), an aged-sexy barmaid from his past; and his former colleague “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer). All are reduced to the advertising koans that Scott let pass for drama. (The Kazansky scene is touchingly fraternal, but so is the shirtless touch-football beach scene — a de rigueur version of Scott’s old semi-homoerotic volleyball montage that restyled Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad as a beer commercial.)
Since our culture has absorbed Scott’s hackwork that defined pure ’80s-Paramount triviality (which Cruise epitomized), we can’t deny that producer-star Cruise understands this manipulation maybe better than any other contemporary film professional does. In Maverick, Cruise and Kosinski build on Scott’s visual shorthand — it’s an improvement, actually. Kosinski (who shrewdly turned Cruise’s personal confessions into Oblivion’s sci-fi fantasy) avoids video-game “immersion” for 2-D spectacle and aerial beauty — the dogfights are more playful and suspenseful than such ’80s-Paramount fodder as The Hunt for Red October. The rudimentary “thrill” of watching 2-D aviators showing the right stuff for a dangerous mission completes the commercial bargain. It is familiar and reassuring — especially given the recent U.S. loss of military dignity and matériel to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
* * *
Tom Cruise knows that if Hollywood is to recover its connection to America’s self-respect after the past decade’s sea change of international apologies and at-home racial protests, the answer might be found in entertainment that satisfies the need for speed. Speed is basic to cinema — from the Greek word “kinesis” (movement), relating to the visceral and emotional workout once known as catharsis. Maverick isn’t sensational entertainment like Transporter III, Torque, Transformer: Dark of the Moon, or anything directed by Zack Snyder, but its simplicity challenges recent lousy hits (i.e., Marvel). The combination of kinetic art and American power create the test that Cruise poses to cynical Millennial moviegoers.
This isn’t necessarily a political test: The flight assignment taking the young pilots to a nuclear plant built somewhere in eastern Europe in violation of a unilateral NATO treaty and the “Show me what you’re made of” challenge won’t mean much to audiences. Simpson’s threat to Mitchell’s maverick behavior is more topical: “I have everything to have you court-martialed and dishonorably discharged” evokes the allegations and accusations heard from Austin, Esper, Milley, and Deep State minions in the media.
Maverick distracts from this demoralizing political reality without ever setting it right, yet it illustrates Cruise’s showmanly sense that maybe Americans desperately want to believe in themselves again. While the latest James Bond movies fail at heroism, Cruise’s action films present a credible sense of valor. This is cleverly suggested when Mitchell ejects from his aircraft, then steps into what looks like an ’80s diner and asks, “Where am I?” An astonished kid answers, “Earth.” It’s a Back to the Future moment — like the film’s pop-music cues from Jerry Lee Lewis and David Bowie to The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” that recall a stable past.
Both Maverick and Cruise’s recent Mission: Impossible movies represent commercially consistent, neo-Hollywood craft. Maverick is only a middling entertainment, but it’s a significant gesture toward recovering a lost virtue — American nostalgia. Cruise gets it — the young ethnic-gender diversity pilots merely concede what he already knows actually lifts audiences out of malaise. Our hype-oriented media treating this vapid movie as a national holiday is unlikely to lift Hollywood out of its stupor.
