Sonny Bunch offered a somewhat tongue-in-cheek take about how Tom Cruise’s Maverick died after breaking Mach 10 in the opening scenes of Top Gun: Maverick, and that he spent the rest of the movie as, I guess, a guardian angel like Richard Dreyfuss in Always. Devout Catholic Ross Douthat, who says that Top Gun: Maverick is not an example of decadence despite its shameless remixes of the greatest hits from the original 1986 Top Gun, has leaned hard into Sonny’s theory. Ross even says that (like the bloody Viking saga The Northman) TG:M “is fundamentally a story about death, and what constitutes a good death.”
I think this is well off the mark. In fact I think TG:M is about something close to the opposite: It’s about living forever! Or at least it’s about how one person can live forever: Tom Cruise. Cruise is pushing 60, he’s ludicrously old for a fighter pilot, and yet, if anything, he’s even more buff than he was in 1986. Nevertheless, everyone in the movie bows to his awesomeness and relies on him to complete the impossible mission, and though he needs a bit of help getting saved from the nameless enemy, that’s just to give Maverick’s late friend Goose’s son Rooster something to do, and for Goose and Maverick to have a manly reconciliation.
TG:M pretends that you can retain the rank of captain indefinitely and continue to serve as long as you like. It makes no sense whatsoever, but it’s thrilling to think that everything can revert to the way it was when we were young, or that nothing ever changes except maybe we might lose a friend or two (such as Iceman) along the way. As I said in my review: The movie flatters old guys in the audience by telling us we’re just as fit and handsome and in-demand as we were in the Reagan administration. Cruise is happy to be our avatar in aviators. Death plays no part in Pete Mitchell’s journey. Death implies grueling collapse and inevitable failure. Maverick does not fail. He can’t fail. He’s Maverick. If Cruise wanted the character to be interesting or complex, he would have demanded that from the screenplay. He didn’t. The screenplay boils down to flustered admirals saying, “Dammit, Maverick, you rebel, you can’t do that! Except you’re awesome, so go ahead.”