Top Gun: Maverick: a review

Before anything else, I'll get this out of the way first: I think anyone who knows me intimately knows I like fighter planes. Thanks to the original Top Gun, various anime series (mostly Macross) and the Ace Combat series of video games, I have a love of planes that I rarely express in public (I had a classmate who also loves planes, but of the commercial airliner kind.)

Since the original film came out more than 30 years ago, the world has changed. The Berlin Wall fell, and with it, the USSR, leaving the United States to find another enemy to fight. The idea of 'terrorism' eventually became the next target, but compared to the monoliths of the Cold War, it's hard to fight an idea, let alone a collection of barely connected organizations that mostly operate in small groups, and often in secret. The role of the fighter jet is nearing its end, supplanted by drone warfare and other similar tools of war.

It is here where Top Gun: Maverick starts, with an aging Maverick (and an equally aging Tom Cruise) ending a short lived test flight by being himself - just recklessly pushing things beyond the limit until things break. Either way, Maverick would have been on his way out, as the program was about to be scrapped anyway to give way to funding for drone technology. This plot point isn't visited again in the movie, which implies that despite any heroics that take place during this movie, the obsolescence of this way of life will only continue.

And obsolescence is one of the biggest themes of this movie: Maverick is tasked with teaching a number of (younger) hotshots like him how to fly an extremely dangerous mission, one that top brass doesn't believe is survivable. Because of story-related limitations, they will not be flying the F-35, currently one of the US' most advanced multirole fighter aircraft in service now. Instead, Maverick's team will be flying the F-18 Super Hornet - a respected workhorse of an aircraft that has served the US for more than 20 years, but is overshadowed by its faster, stealthier more maneuverable, more heavily armed successors - a plane much like Maverick himself.

You can see the haunt in Maverick's face whenever he is reminded of his storied past - and his fixation is perhaps not of glories now gone, but instead of memories of friends that are no longer here. He is a dinosaur, the last vestige of a way of life that is quickly disappearing. In a way it is similar to Cruise's turn in The Last Samurai (2003), albeit in this film the culture is his own and not appropriated from somewhere else. The competitive spirit of the first film is all but gone in this film. There are no pissing contests to speak of, because there is no true opponent - even in the film, the 'enemy' is vague, nameless and indistinct. They are merely targets to be destroyed; objects (or rather, objectives) to be met.

And yet, Top Gun: Maverick also examines fatherhood, or rather, a pseudo-fatherhood shaped by generational trauma. The sons of Top Gun are often sons without fathers: in the original film Maverick's character was shaped from a father that left him too soon; his recklessness is a product of faux machismo, toxic masculinity so to say, created to hide his own insecurities. On the other hand, Rooster (Miles Teller) had his career shaped both by the loss of his own father and by the influence of the man involved (though to be fair, not responsible) for his father's death. Maverick and Rooster's relationship is not clean-cut - there are no speeches or melodramatic moments between the two, to the point where one could argue the relationship is 'underdeveloped'. But that's often how fathers and sons go: often it boils down to the formation of an unspoken understanding, much like any father and son relationship.

In my plane-obsessed mind, there's an interesting kind of symmetry in this kind of relationship to the other themes of the film: the father, like an old but trusty F-18, scared of his own impending obsolescence, has difficulty imparting his wisdom to his younger, healthier son, an advanced and state of the art F-35. That's probably stretching the metaphor a bit. In any case, 'it's not the plane that matters, it's the pilot', and for these macho hotshots, self worth might have been the best thing to have all along.