The original Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer, is a movie my dad is a pretty big fan of. He’s been begging me to watch for a while, so I took time over the summer to do so. While I didn’t love it, I had a much more enjoyable watch than I was expecting. My opinion of it boils down to this: I love Goose, I hate the romance plot, and the best parts were any time there were planes in the air.
Ironically, neither of my parents enjoyed its highly acclaimed 2022 sequel, which I also watched over the summer. Maybe binging so close together helped, because I strangely liked it more than the first one, even if there are still a few issues.
Top Gun: Maverick follows original protagonist Pete “Maverick” Mitchell as he’s brought back to Top Gun to train a new batch of Navy pilots to accomplish a near-impossible mission. Among them is the understandably angsty Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, the son of Maverick’s old and (spoiler for the first movie) deceased partner Goose.
To get the good out of the way first, the flying scenes are incredible. Tom Cruise is at the point in his life where he wants the movies he’s involved in to feel as authentic as possible, so he and the other actors went through extensive pilot training and flew for real, filming themselves inside the jet.
The cast is pretty stacked as well. All of the pilots are played by talented actors who appeared in big projects not long after this film: Danny Ramirez (Fanboy) and Lewis Pullman (Bob) both in Marvel films, Greg Tarzan Davis (Coyote) in Mission Impossible, and Monica Barbaro (Phoenix) got nominated for an Oscar in A Complete Unknown. The most famous, however, easily became Glen Powell, who played the cocky Hangman, charming his way into our hearts with Twisters and Anyone But You following Maverick.
The only outlier to this trend is Miles Teller, who played Rooster and had garnered a decent amount of fame prior to Maverick. Not only does he look exactly like Anthony Edwards did as Goose, but he gives a very emotional and entertaining performance that I would’ve loved to see more of (more on that later).
Now, I’ve been dishing out a lot of praise, but this movie did make me really mad with its lack of originality. Every scene in this film happened in the original, from the mock dogfight and the music to playing on the beach. If I hadn’t watched these back-to-back, I probably wouldn’t have noticed it as much.
To be fair, all of these scenes are more enjoyable because the characters are a little bit more memorable. Also, the last third of the movie, which is the actual mission itself, makes up for it. It felt more like Mission: Impossible than Top Gun. It’s pretty fun to watch!
The element of the original movie I hated most was the romance between Maverick and Charlie, as Charlie was a very bland love interest. And, any scenes between them dragged and felt out of place from the rest of the film. While Maverick and Penny’s relationship in the sequel is still as boring and unnecessary, the pre-established relationship makes for a more interesting dynamic to watch.
The biggest issue with Maverick, though, is Maverick himself. I appreciate Tom Cruise for his dedication to the craft, but it’s no secret that he allegedly has a huge vanity problem and that all the movies he’s in have an overt focus on him. I especially find Maverick obnoxious to watch, albeit slightly less so since he’s a teacher in this one.
I wished that Rooster was the main focus of this film, since he was surprisingly complex for not having a whole lot to say. He’s got a lot of emotional baggage regarding Maverick, since he was inadvertently involved in his father’s death. Interestingly enough, he’s nervous about having a similar accident. Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t spend as much time on him as I would like.
While frustrating, Top Gun: Maverick was an impressive and enjoyable improvement over the original and a fantastic summer blockbuster!
Go check it out and form your own opinions!
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