Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
Spoilers ahead.
Movie rating: 8/10
For better or for worse, this movie is exactly what I expected. It’s a de facto remake and update of the first Top Gun that’s better than the original—admittedly not a high bar. It’s a work of blatant and effective military propaganda, just like its predecessor. It’s the work of seasoned professionals who know what they’re doing: well-written, well-acted, with enjoyable music and action. It depicts war like a video game, waged against a foreign enemy the filmmakers manage to avoid explicitly naming. The dramatic elements are better than they have any right to be for a Top Gun sequel, given that the original barely had a plot and was a glorified extended music video/Navy recruitment ad.
Top Gun: Maverick is now the highest grossing movie of 2022, having earned more than $1.3 billion around the world at the time this review was written. Watching it, I could see why. Especially in the United States, it captures the current zeitgeist among older generations. As reality grows ever more bleak and miserable amid a global pandemic, climate crisis, inflation, poverty, and sociopolitical strife, people understandably find comfort in nostalgia for the past and a glossy, idealized version of the present.
If you enjoyed the first Top Gun, or even if you have vague memories of that time, Maverick will tickle your nostalgia bone. While I’m a great fan of ’80s action movies, Top Gun was never a favourite of mine. I loved the soundtrack, the eponymous roller coaster at Canada’s Wonderland (back when Paramount owned the park) since renamed Flight Deck, and enjoyed quoting the movie. But I probably only saw the movie once or twice many years ago, and never thought much about it.
By hitting all the same beats as the original, Maverick reminds people of a certain age of what was almost certainly a better time in their lives. Along with reprises of “Top Gun Anthem” and Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone”, the sequel features lots of classic rock tunes boomers will love. We get the intro of planes landing on an aircraft carrier, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) riding on his motorcycle; admirals chewing out Cruise for being reckless; Rooster (Miles Teller), son of Goose, with a moustache that makes him a dead ringer for his father, playing “Great Balls of Fire” on piano; a game played shirtless on the beach that’s irrelevant to the plot; a romance and love scene in the middle; the death of a significant character; and the climactic mission.
Somehow the movie manages to both ignore and acknowledge the passage of time. Unlike most men pushing 60, Tom Cruise looks almost the same as he did 35 years ago. Jennifer Connelly, playing Maverick’s love interest Penny Benjamin, looks much younger than the average woman over 50. Most people who reach their 50s and 60s will not look as good at that age as Hollywood stars who can afford the best physical trainers, nutritionists, makeup artists, and (possibly) cosmetic surgeons money can buy. Kelly McGillis, who played Cruise’s love interest in the first film, bluntly said as much when asked why she was not invited to return:
McGillis first revealed in 2019 that she was not asked to star in the “Top Gun” sequel, saying at the time, “I’m old, and I’m fat, and I look age-appropriate for what my age is. And that is not what that whole scene is about. To me, I’d much rather feel absolutely in my skin and who I am at my age as opposed to placing a value on all that other stuff.”
While its leading couple present a youthful appearance despite their years, the movie does not shy away from the fact that much has changed since Cruise first portrayed a hotshot Navy pilot in 1986. Maverick is training a generation of younger pilots who call him “old-timer”. His love interest is a divorced mother with a teenage daughter. His former rival, now friend, Iceman (Val Kilmer) is a four-star admiral and commander of the Pacific fleet, but fighting a terminal illness that renders him unable to speak much of the time. The dramatic centre of the movie is Maverick’s attempt to mend a relationship with the grown son of his long-dead best friend.
This passage of time gives the sequel greater emotional weight and helps it transcend the military propaganda aspects, which rest assured I will get into. When Cruise and Kilmer share a scene together, the result is genuinely moving. These men are older, wiser, carry regrets, and are increasingly conscious that their time on earth is limited. Iceman’s disease parallels Kilmer’s real-life struggles with cancer. It’s hard not to become reflective of our own aging and mortality watching this scene.
Yet the movie also acknowledges the advanced years of its stars in more lighthearted ways, such as after a love scene between Cruise and Connelly. When Penny’s daughter unexpectedly arrives home early, Cruise has to escape through the window. It’s a funny, charming subversion of the usual trope where a young man has to escape through the window after his girlfriend’s parents arrive home.
No review of Top Gun can avoid mentioning its propagandistic nature. That these films are military propaganda is not exactly a groundbreaking take. The U.S. Navy reported that the number of young men who applied to become navy aviators increased by 500 per cent after the success of the 1986 film. Many recruiters set up booths right outside movie theatres. The close involvement of the Pentagon in determining the content of U.S. films and TV shows, including script approval, is too expansive a subject to cover here. But even Jeff Bezos’s rag The Washington Post acknowledged that Top Gun is “brought to you by the U.S. military”:
“Top Gun: Maverick” received support from the Department of Defense (DOD) in the form of equipment — including jets and aircraft carriers — personnel and technical expertise. This was authorized by the DOD Entertainment Media Office, which assists filmmakers telling military stories.
Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Glen Roberts, who leads the DOD Entertainment Media Office, notes that Top Gun was “one of the largest projects that the Department of Defense has ever supported.” The Post says of the 1986 movie:
It’s unlikely the film could have gotten made without the Pentagon’s considerable support. A single F-14 Tomcat cost about $38 million. The total budget for “Top Gun” was $15 million.
In exchange for DOD backing, the producers agreed to let the department make changes to the script. […] These days, when collaborating on a movie, the Pentagon can still demand script rewrites out of concern for veracity.
After decades of unpopular post-9/11 wars, as Washington wages a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and engages in ever more reckless and aggressive sabre-rattling against China, U.S. imperialism is failing its military recruitment goals and desperately needs new cannon fodder. The Pentagon hopes that the Top Gun sequel will bolster recruitment much like the original did. “Roberts expects “Top Gun: Maverick” to ‘inspire a new generation of Americans,’” the Post writes—laughably adding Roberts’s claim that “DOD Entertainment Media doesn’t work with military recruiters.” Uh-huh.
Top Gun ended with a military confrontation against an unnamed enemy piloting MiG aircraft that could only be a stand-in for the Soviet Union. That is, it ended with U.S. and what are clearly Soviet fighters in a shooting war that in reality might escalate to World War III. Top Gun: Maverick likewise climaxes with a mission to destroy a uranium enrichment facility in an unnamed country that has fifth-generation fighters at its disposal. The only non-Western countries that have access to fifth-generation fighters are Russia and China. Targeting a uranium enrichment facility, however, suggests Iran, which U.S. presidents constantly threaten to attack. In the climax, Cruise and Teller steal an F-14 Tomcat in enemy territory. The Iranian military has an ample supply of F-14s, which it received in great numbers from the U.S. when the country was ruled by the despotic shah.
Socialist Appeal sums up Maverick’s perspective of nostalgia—both for the pop culture of decades past and the waning strength of U.S. imperialism—and its anxiety at the rise of new imperialist rivals like Russia and especially China:
As with so many recent films, it is a nostalgia fest. It is part of an increasingly large number of films and television that revive franchises from several decades ago, such as Jurassic World, Cobra Kai (Karate Kid), Creed (Rocky), The Matrix, and Trainspotting 2. […] The proliferation of these films says a lot about western capitalism and its stagnation. The best culture capitalism now produces is only capable of looking backwards.
The review also notes that the film reflects both the arrogance and delusion of U.S. imperialism in its decline:
The movie paints the US not as imperialist, but as the upholder of the ‘rules based international order’. It is for this reason that the film has to justify the mission, which is to destroy an enemy facility, on the grounds that this facility breaks an international treaty.
And yet Cruise’s method in the film is to break the rules, to think outside the box, and to take the planes beyond their safe limits. Bold rule breaking is, apparently, the only way their inferior aircraft will be able to defeat the enemy.
The message is clear: the US sets the rules and polices them, but must be allowed to break them to maintain its domination.
Thanks to their daring creativity in the air, our all-American heroes come out on top, thereby securing US military dominance – at which point we are treated to a bit of camaraderie between the pilots, who celebrate with a league table of who has the most kills.
Nevertheless, the anxiety of US imperialism is unmistakable. No one seriously thinks the US can maintain dominance over China purely on account of its old school heroes. The film is therefore partly nostalgic wishful thinking for US imperialism, and partly a call for good old-fashioned American unity to confront China.
In reality, the relative decline of US imperialism is irreversible. And for this reason so are the deep divisions in American society.
The action scenes in the film are exciting, but after a while can feel monotonous, as shots of flying jets alternate with shots of actors in cockpits reacting.
As a summer film, this movie does what it sets out to do. It’s well-crafted and entertaining. But the movie is ultimately a fantasy in which an attractive, diverse crew of cool and accomplished pilots, “the best of the best”, representing the most world’s most brutal and aggressive imperialist power, bomb a nameless country and this is presented as an unambiguously good and heroic act. In spirit, Maverick is no different from countless Hollywood action films where the U.S. military fights and defeats aliens, zombies, giant robots and so on. But the fact that its antagonist here is ostensibly a real country, and that (as in the original) the ramifications of direct military conflict between nuclear-armed powers are ignored, make this more ominous than most escapist action pictures.
Movies like Top Gun are fun if you turn your brain off and ignore its jingoistic agenda. Purely as a movie, I have to admit it’s good summer spectacle with engaging action and performances. It’s strong, well-made propaganda. But with the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than at any time in history, Top Gun’s rah-rah militarism and celebration of U.S. aggression, part of a broader ideological offensive, are dangerous in the extreme. This is how leaders of the most murderous and reactionary military power on earth view the world, and that should be cause for alarm.