Top Gun: Vigilant
When announcing her ‘80s-inspired ballad Hold My Hand written for Top Gun: Maverick, Lady Gaga wrote on Instagram “I didn’t even realize the multiple layers it spanned across the film’s heart, my own psyche, and the nature of the world we’ve been living in. […] This song is a love letter to the world during and after a very hard time,” alluding to the pandemic and a panoply of other deadly irritations of late. When Tom Cruise heard it after feverishly searching for any song that might not surpass the classic hits of the first film, but at least do right by it, he leapt at it. “It became the heartbeat of the film, what she did. And I called her and said, ‘I don’t think you understand, emotionally…’ I was so concerned, until I heard that piece.”
There’s something larger than capitalizing on nostalgia at play here, though that’s definitely in the mix. To illustrate the magic trick Tom and others played here, consider one example of how its apolitical nature allowed others to inscribe their politics into it. The ostensible heart of Top Gun: Maverick was Gaga belting out a sob from a place that some on the right typically pillory as the stereotypical liberal softness of self-care, cringe self-seriousness, and elite Covid pandering that ill-fits the rest of the film. And yet the reaction from the right is near-overwhelming praise, calling it an “anti-woke” film that “maintains the pro-American, pro-military message of the original” and “rebuffs the anti-patriotic currents of our day.” This is only one amusing meeting on common ground among a great many spectrums, which causes me to wonder how this highly successful and widely approved sequel struck magic again, albeit in a very different way this time.
Any popular film is by its very nature selected by inviting wide swaths of us into its world, allowing us to see ourselves in it despite inhabiting space caustically together. There are many ways to seduce and transport the audience, but two in particular are at work in either Top Gun film. In the 1986 film, the audience got pulled into the dizzying jetwash of something fresh and unknown, something undefined and infinite that you can fly into, a vast newness at the edge of experience where little exposition was spent informing you of acronyms or aviation terms, an equal parts chill and fiery romance that swept your wings back, the thrill of flight in cinema, “rock and roll stars of the sky” as Tony Scott put it. The 2022 film is its polar opposite, having everything defined, finite, and recognizable, but in such a way that you feel wonderful in familiar terrain, a return home to childhood. You could smell the tarmac, exhausts, and neatly cropped grass from the summer air shows in the ’80s. A Proustian madeleine, but dunked in jet fuel instead of tea. Just as the films don’t name The Enemy (a mixture of the USSR, China, North Korea, and Iran between both), they leave open an abstract space for all our bothersome culture and political wars to drown out of our individual imagination while we soar with freshly born icons in the first one and trusted icons in the second one. In our present age of revisiting iconic intellectual properties with proven box office results, they’re so towering, broadly cherished by consumers, and protected emotionally and legally that even those originally involved like Tom and Bruckheimer might not be the best people to consult on the original’s magic, even if they struck gold by tapping a different darker magic this time.
Repeat viewings of installments in a franchise yields more connections you may not have spotted on the first run, but instinctually picked up as a marker that this is the same safe and inviting world. An agile and inventive sequel might play a fun trick by having new spins on familiar archetypes, or rearranging the game pieces atop the same theme. A sequel less confident in its own skin might give in at key moments, struggling to deliver conceptually without hugging tightly to motifs and copied scenes or even protruding lines that remind you of the original to arouse familiarity. Indeed, people seeing conservatism in the sequel aren’t necessarily wrong, it’s just not a political conservatism, but a narrative one — a slavery to fandom’s chaotic desire to be manipulated. The apolitical reactionary impulse in fandom is rooted in the feelings implanted earlier in a franchise or universe that tie in with their lives — you fuck with that, you fuck with their lives. Though like its political cousin, fandom reaction starves the flames of ingenuity of the seminal work and relies on decayed reliquaries with ever greater capital investments.
Because of Tom and the others’ playing the safe bet on the fans, the sequel perhaps doesn’t deserve the title of Maverick, because quite unlike the original, this one is as reliable a by-the-book team player as Iceman. Tom took one look at what happens to other franchises that try to subvert the fans’ imaginative worlds, and hit the scramjets. The question is whether they needed to go so far, or rather, stay so within a rigid rulebook of rarely attempting something new to please the fans.
To its credit, Top Gun: Maverick is also inventively invoking the past. Goose’s son (callsign: Rooster) now represents Iceman’s steady caution, while the new Maverick (callsign: Hangman) serves as his nemesis of the crew, giving the locker room rivalry of the original as well as the continuing maverickian theme a couple twists. This is the fun and engaging kind of franchise self-reference another ’80s recall, Cobra Kai, has demonstrated often. But for Top Gun, it far more often goes hard in the opposite direction. Rooster playing the exact same song at the piano with aviator sunglasses that his father did, Maverick’s new love interest being laid down on the bed in a scene with the exact shot as Kelly McGillis, Ed Harris being an angry bald superior officer using almost the exact words to turn what might’ve led to a court martial into an order to report to the Top Gun school like how James Tolkan’s carrier captain did are but three of many dozens of examples of the sequel bowing to the power of the original’s shadow imposed by audience’s imaginations. These simply intermittently remake the first film while feigning a sequel, and the only non-scoundrel reasoning can be a meretricious argument that one culminating scene towards the end provides relief when it doesn’t copy the first film as the other scenes imply it would.
The most egregious example, by the way, is the opening scene on the carrier deck which tightly copies the first film’s, replacing F-14s with F/A-18s, but maintaining Tony Scott’s love for dim crepuscular lighting, playing Harold Faltermeyer’s theme then Kenny Loggins’ and Giorgio Moroder’s Danger Zone to confirm this is a Top Gun film. But it then immediately breaks to Tom working in his private hangar with what I’m guessing is the P-51 Mustang that the real Tom actually owns, reminding of how the character of James T. Kirk in the Star Trek reboot series sort of became partly the real William Shatner. The hanger is also replete with other reliquaries from the original to keep reminding you of it visually, but only under the blanket of much kitschier music more of a kind with the rest of the new soundtrack. In the original, that opening carrier shot was germane to the plot, launching you up with Maverick for a mission off his carrier. Here, it’s just there for show, completely disconnected from the following plot, showing you the lengths the filmmakers will go to immediately and loudly stay faithful to the original in a way that doesn’t touch the third rails in consumers’ memories by not changing anything important.
Before that, Tom shows up ahead of any of the company cards or titles to break the fourth wall and restate his refrain you hear from him constantly on late night / chat shows of dedicating his frenetic and dangerous stunt-driven films of late “to you, the fans.” He understands well who his bosses are, and the box office figures show you how well he stands on his own without the support of comic book fandom or franchises outside of Mission Impossible, which has slowly been absorbed by Tom Cruise Inc.. So his objective was to take what he believes made the original movie so cool and inviting, maybe the greatest example of any film with that power. Ask any honest anti-imperialist, left wing, pacifist or even outright anti-American person what they think of Top Gun and you’ll get perfunctory mentions of military industrial propaganda, swill for the plebs, etc.. Then you’ll hear something like, “but despite that, it actually does rock, lowkey.”
It’s quickly apparent that what Tom drew from Top Gun was that he wanted audiences to have an even more immersive experience in the cockpit. He only said yes to a sequel for the potential of more real shots and more real planes. The original made huge advances for aerial combat cinema. Another film featuring F-14s in combat came out 6 years earlier, The Final Countdown, a Sci-Fi film about a modern aircraft carrier being sent back to just before Pearl Harbor. It includes some funny scenes of F-14s dogfighting with A6M Zeros, shot beautifully by J. David Jones, but with very limited invite into those F-14s — out of the scope of the narrative. Top Gun used similar scale models for exploding and splashing bogeys, but the effects team were far more detailed and thorough in blowing them up. Extensive cockpit shots filmed in a hangar allowed you to identify with the pilots and form story. They aimed for a documentary feel to achieve startling verisimilitude. The Final Countdown failed to connect with audiences because it was overshadowed by The Empire Strikes Back, while producer Jerry Bruckheimer knew from the get-go that a story he read about the Top Gun school held potential for “Star Wars on Earth.” The coolness of Top Gun was in part the space it opened to place yourself in the cockpit.
The biggest unmitigated triumph of Top Gun: Maverick is its advances in flight cinematography. Tom had the cast do a boot camp longer than the first film’s to minimize the learning curve (i.e., the puking) for actual shoots in F/A-18’s. In the original, a lot of the flight footage was more or less useless. Val Kilmer joked that “I didn’t know people could actually turn green and then blue.” The original relied heavily on the cockpit footage from inside the hangar, with ADR and editing giving shape to the story later. Out of all the outlandish maneuvers the filmmakers begged the real pilots to okay for them in the original, the “let me just hit the brakes and get behind the enemy following me” seems to have stuck through both films. But like Daniel Larusso’s crane kick, its continued use runs up against a new move by the bad guys: a Pugachev’s Cobra, which was really fun to see — if entirely CG’d — because the Russians very unkindly refused to offer up an Su-57 to the filmmakers just like they did a MiG-29 in the original. If for nothing else, the sequel’s prioritization of the flight sequences should be why you see the second film.
And yet even with this dedication to improving the camera tech and the methods of filming, the second one lacks some of the luster of another recent film with an air combat component, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, which for my money is the most graceful lift into the clouds communicating more of a love of the Wild Blue Yonder than any film. Authenticity, and firmly placing the audience in an actual flying cockpit instead of hangar shots, and in ways we’ve never seen before cannot be doubted. But there’s something to be said for a talented filmmaker knowing what to do with that, with or without the tech. The advances are impressive, but was the envelope really pushed as far as the first film was? Without Googling, do you know the names Gene Cernan or Harrison Schmitt? I bet you didn’t need to google the first two men to walk on the moon.
Tom’s deduction of what made the original so cool, immersion, might be just as wrong as the insistence on James Cameron’s part for another big blockbuster over a decade ago that 3D was the height of film immersion. And Tom’s deduction of playing it safe with empty channeling of nostalgia like in The Force Awakens’ proven results might have been equally as damaging. All of Mammon’s gifts evaporate, melt, and dissolve quickly.
The rest of the story begins to fall from the triumph of the aerial shots slightly in some and dramatically in other aspects. What Tom and others describe as the emotional core of the film, the conflict between Maverick and Rooster, is rather rushed into a pat synthesis. It’s set up with an interesting enough arithmetic, posing both Goose’s death and Maverick’s keeping Rooster out of the academy as twin forces of conflict between them. But it sticks the landing because it says it sticked the landing. Without the planes or the direct quotes of the original, once they’re together nearing their resolution, the writing begins to wackily take cues from The Force Awakens with “are we doing this? we’re doing this!”-level Abrams foolishness. Admittedly, forcing a resolution wasn’t unknown to the original either. Remember how easily Maverick was allowed to zoom through grief at Mach 2. His fundamental character flaw being responsible for Goose’s death is washed away before saving the day deserved more work then, and it deserved more now. Val Kilmer couldn’t believe the “you could be my wingman any time” line and refused to do it. He was right. Iceman’s entire presence in the sequel, by the way, is built off that shaky foundation. Iceman must be included — Sum pius Cruisus.
Tom and the others all saw the rapid edits in intense combat in the original that runs so fast you probably never noticed when planes fire guns it’s a dismounted Vulcan cannon firing in a black room, and presumed they could use those sort of cuts liberally through most of their plot, even where it didn’t belong, to speedrun us through a bunch of pushups and training to get back up in the air. They’re mistaking speed for rhythm. I won’t make too much of Top Gun: Maverick’s plot mirroring things from both Iron Eagle and Iron Eagle II, like the asinine plot points of using fighter planes for rescue / escape and a ragtag group of disjointed pilots training for a mission to disable a Middle Eastern enemy developing nukes and the name “Darkstar” for the operation in Iron Eagle II and Tom’s plane in this movie. I’ll leave it at one word: hmmmm. Nor will I spend too many words on how empty, uncool, undeveloped, and uninteresting the love story in the new one is compared to the original. As lovely as Jennifer Connelly is, all she’s really doing in this film is going on a Top Gun theme park ride, perhaps the avatar of many middle aged women in the audience, but she’s in no way developed like Charlie Blackwood as someone equally sour about not being taken seriously as Pete Mitchell. The editors of the first film may have jokingly called the non-combat scenes “B plot”, but it reads like George Eliot comparatively.
While he was coming up with the infamous Danger Zone, Giorgio Moroder thought of talks he had with his Ferrari mechanic. Harold Faltermeyer’s inspiration for the soundtrack was seeing firsthand how a lot of real fighter pilots blasted Billy Idol. Terri Nunn, who carried us into the skies in her own way during the love scene, was singing Moroder’s lyrics from an actual lonely yearning for love. We went from “If only for today, I am unafraid” to “I know you’re scared and your pain is imperfect, But don’t you give up on yourself.” When the new film wants to, it’s entirely within its rights to just re-use the old songs. Tom was right to know he couldn’t possibly match that lightning in a bottle even if he brought Moroder, Loggins and the boys back, but the inspiration for the new film’s ballad being anxiety over the state of the world as the Long ’90s comes to a tedious end really does set the tone for the different orientations of both films: one intrepidly breaking into the new, the other in the past’s shadow. Cue the “We used to make shit in this country” jeremiad from The Wire.
This sequel was very true to the rotten corpse and self-serving fandom fantasies of the original, but a sequel true to the spirit of the original would have looked very different. However, an imperfect but far better example of a film that falls into my second category, ones that invite audiences in with memories of the past, usually sequels but also pastiches, would be Blade Runner 2049. In my opinion, it’s an improvement on the original. It remains imperfect because it was as much of a box office dud as its predecessor. People love ripping through the open air on a fighter plane and dreamy romances a lot more than dismal futures of peonage and depressing pocket waifus. But what it got right was allowing a new unique vision from Denis Villeneuve to carry on further thoughts on the same world from Hampton Fancher. The uniqueness here was the sterility of robotics and tech, the story a slapdash jaunt pantomiming the original, the vision Tom Cruise Inc..
Top Gun: Maverick achieves its success, I think, in being the empty calories of fandom appeasement. It very unmaverickly and vigilantly nods to “you, the fans” in a way pious to the inert elements of the original with some new kinetic elements thanks to tech advances that will wow you and roll the feelings, but like the RedLetterMedia guys asked of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, what new icon was built here? Even Ghostbusters 2 had Vigo the Carpathian. Those Su-57s weren’t as good as Vigo. An actually daring sequel probably would have been impossible because of the hegemony of the common fan, and the common Tom.
