Top Gun: Maverick — Tom Cruise at Peak Performance

By rights Top Gun: Maverick should be the kind of movie that I tend to bemoan in this column: a nostalgia-steeped sequel to a 1980s blockbuster, a transparent attempt to pull Baby Boomers back into theaters by cashing in on their memories of youth, yet another exercise in recursion and repetition from a culture stuck in loops.

But I come to praise the Top Gun sequel, not to bury it. This is a summer blockbuster in the classic style — its action sequences suitably implausible but still connected to the realities of skin and steel and sky; its breezy dialogue and male-bonding rituals unburdened by the heaviness of world-building; its plot a deliberate contrivance that still carries just the right amount of moral and even metaphysical weight. I don’t really want to know what Dorian Gray–ish deal keeps Tom Cruise looking ageless, especially if it’s a deal he made with the Church of Scientology. But as with the artist, so with this example of his art: Top Gun: Maverick is an autumnal story, featuring an old fighter jock’s last mission, made in what seems like the autumn of cinema itself — and yet somehow it feels fresh, youthful, vigorous.

A few things make this possible. First, it helps that the original movie is a beloved slice of all-American Reagan-era cheese, but not all that much more. This isn’t a case where a sequel could retrospectively sully the memory or achievement of its predecessor: The predecessor was already kitschy the moment it came out. Nor is it a case where the demands and expectations of an expanded universe or an obsessive fan base warp storytelling choices. Nobody is sitting around reading about the Top Gun multiverse and issuing online ultimatums about what characters can and cannot do, and as a consequence the new film is free to be entirely self-contained, an end unto itself.

To that purpose it gives us a single, simple mission. Cruise’s ace pilot, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, is facing obsolescence in an age of drone warfare, and given a chance to prove the worth of a new manned fighter, he pushes it too far past Mach 10 and goes down in flames. Yet from that crash comes a last chance to make a difference: After he walks miraculously unscathed from the wreckage, he’s summoned back to the “Top Gun” school to train a group of younger pilots for a jaunt into an unnamed hostile country, where an almost-operational nuclear reactor needs to be taken out via a series of impossible aerial maneuvers that only Maverick can teach.

The group of would-be bunker-busters includes the son of his doomed friend from the first movie — call-sign “Rooster” (Miles Teller), whose father was Anthony Edwards’s late lamented Goose — with whom Maverick has unfinished business; the nearby aces’ bar is run by a fetching and mostly age-appropriate bartender (Jennifer Connelly), an admiral’s daughter with whom Maverick has an unfinished romance. Throw in some predictable jockeying between the younger flyboys (and one flygirl) and that’s about it: No loose ends, no secondary romances, no setups for Top Gun 3, no real villains except the anonymous adversaries and a stuffed-shirt commander (Jon Hamm) who doesn’t care for Maverick’s style.

All of this simplicity could be merely serviceable, but late-career (or is it mid-career?) Cruise and his current amanuensis, Christopher McQuarrie — who directs the Mission: Impossible movies and did scriptwork on this one — are notable for their refusal to be satisfied with average. So the aerial spectacles are a peak-performance blend of virtual effects and real pilots and machines. The personal moments improve on the original, particularly a moving use of the cancer-stricken Val Kilmer, who shows up briefly to reprise his role as Iceman. And like a number of critics, I think the script is up to something of supernatural interest, which I won’t spoil outright (the Internet will do that for you), beyond suggesting that you should pay close attention to every piece of dialogue involving God or angels or salvation, and refresh your knowledge of how many miracles it takes to prove that a Catholic saint is actually interceding from the great beyond.

As for the movie’s politics, they are of course as rah-rah pro-American and pro-military as the original, with the only ambiguity supplied by how the film’s dualities, its mix of autumnal themes and youthful energy, interact with the uncertainty of our own geopolitical context. If the original is remembered as a signifier of Reagan’s restoration of American confidence and might, this one will play in different ways depending on what our geopolitical future holds. It could be a twilight story, a last hurrah amid imperial decline, or it could be a story about figuring out how to fight and win in a newly multipolar world. But that’s not up to the filmmakers; it’s up to us.