My parents texted to say “Top Gun: Maverick, best sequel EVER!” but when I followed up with “Better than Empire? Terminator?” they didn’t respond, which made me think that they might have been limiting themselves to a narrower pool of sequels, e.g. Toy Story, Bad Boys, Jurassic World, Paddington, etc., etc. Now that I’ve seen it, I have to conclude that this movie is probably really confusing to watch for anyone under the age of sixteen or anyone who hasn’t seen the original, not because there are any ideas that are particularly hard to grasp or wrestle with, but more so because the implied knowledge that Maverick assumes with a slick runtime of a little over two hours means that there is very little time to “build story” or “have emotional stakes.”
On this point, my MIL kept saying that all I ever mentioned whenever I was trying to convince her to see it with me during our time together last month was the word “Goose,” and the second time she said this, I started to wonder if my entire memory of the original film was the nickname of one of the pilots. But I think that I’m not entirely blameless, because the movie is so stripped down and approachable with its one size fits all Daddy Issues plot that it doesn’t invest all that much time in you learning the backstories or even the individual personalities of the other pilots who are in Maverick. When an American plane blows up during a mission at the end, killing two people we’ve known for an hour plus, it’s hard to even remember their call signs–oh no… Haymaker? Which one was he? Did he have a pool cue at the bar? Was he first… in his class five years ago? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. If you can keep the name Goose and then the name Iceman in your head, you’ve got all the requisite information necessary to follow the significant characters.
Some of the coolest things they tried to do with the story was create a new mythos among the team, new rivalries, very little sexual tension or romance, allowing me to drop this piece of gold from Blood Knife’s RS Benedict dissecting the phenomena of sexless sex symbols in comic book movies. It’s the difference between a franchise that is rich with stories and ideas and one that’s on life support, hooked up directly to the cold beating heart of its lead Tom Cruise. Anyway, after the bar scene and debatably the training sequences, when the young bloods spend more time interacting with Maverick than they do with each other, the story says fuck you for trying to be invested in these young lives, don’t you remember Goose? How dare you try to leave him behind! So we visit Val Kilmer AKA Iceman to talk about, yes, Goose.
Val Kilmer, at least in one review I’d read, is supposedly the emotional heart of this movie, the person who gives dignity and gravitas to an otherwise hedonistic and caloric summer blockbuster (because he’s been retired from acting for a while for medical reasons). I don’t particularly understand it? He seems like he’s in charge of the Pacific Fleet, but he spends a lot of time micromanaging his old friend’s time? He’s not particularly inspiring in terms of his advice–“you need to let go,” or some variation on that? It feels like a Sad, Serious Moment when we see him, since his wife seems pretty upset about whatever mystery ailment has struck him suddenly. Probably the most disappointing thing is that he dies. Mom says what takes her out of it is the fact that at his funeral he’s surrounded by a bunch of grunts–“where’s the President? Where are the admirals?” and my mom LIKED this movie–“better than Green Book!” (She didn’t actually say that, but wow what a fun conversation to have in 2022!) I don’t know why he had to die or if it dignified the movie more to have its lone disabled character take himself off the board? I submit to you that one of the things I realized about Val Kilmer recently is that he is about one degree of separation from a seven or eight of my favorite films in my late 20s.
I debriefed with Mom after watching and we agreed that there wasn’t a sequence of this movie that lasted too long. I liked the intros at the bar, she liked the training that I had seen in the extended 10 min trailer before Doctor Strange 2. I felt bad for Jennifer Connelly that so much of her direction was to vogue at Tom Cruise while telling him she wasn’t interested. MIL groused, “How estranged is he from this family, where he knows the kid but they haven’t spent any time together?” One of the odd things about the distance between this movie and its predecessor is that so much has to be alluded to in the middle period–“you angered ANOTHER admiral?” “Don’t leave my mom again” “I’m always keeping track of you” “What are you still doing here?”.
So ultimately, what can be said about this movie that hasn’t already been said? I’ll include some great pieces below, but if you haven’t managed to see this oddly luckily delayed movie which became the perfect vessel for Americans to put their frustration and boredom with the Ukraine conflict into, you probably will not feel the urge to seek it out again. As Mom put it, what story needed to be concluded from the original? Were we wondering where Iceman was going to get promoted? Tough as nails, that lady is.
A lot of great writing about Maverick: Slate’s investigation of the identity of the mysterious “rogue state” swirled in my head during the second half. Also, the little Easter egg things like the change to his Taiwan flag insignia to show the strength of Chinese censors in American cinema is such a juicy detail to counter the corona of machismo surrounding this movie. But maybe the purest piece I’ve encountered about the legacy of Top Gun is the analysis of its gay subtext compared to the original.
