“Oh my god. This thing is so old,” Rooster (Miles Teller) says at one point when he’s given no choice but to board an F-14 with his newly embraced mentor and father figure, Maverick (Tom Cruise). The plane in question—which used to be “endlessly modern” in 1986—is located in the hangar of a “rogue” state. One that doesn’t take too much time to get to from San Diego, if that means anything… but still, it leads a viewer to question which nation co-screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie (who also served as the writer for a number of other Cruise action movies), Eric Warren Singer (downgrading from his work on American Hustle) and Ehren Kruger (who, most recently, collaborated with the former two writers on, of all things, Dumbo) have in mind. And this type of screenwriting tactic (vilifying another country) in an action- and Armed Forces-centric movie is, fittingly, a well-trodden trope of many an 80s film, including The Day After, WarGames and Miracle Mile (which, like the original Top Gun, also had Anthony Edwards as its star). One might even say the us v. them tactic the U.S. still so relishes is “retro” at best, and all too current at worst.
Either way, at the outset of Top Gun: Maverick, the audience almost has to double-check that they didn’t somehow end up at a special screening of the original Top Gun when the opening notes to Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” (co-produced by, of all people, Giorgio Moroder—just another one of many ways in which Top Gun is a homoerotic movie) proceed to soundtrack the intro scenes, complete with that same title card that kicked off the ’86 edition. But since the entire sequel is determined to pay homage to the original—in every way except mentioning Kelly McGillis’ character, Charlie Blackwood—while also vastly improving upon it (which, let’s be honest, isn’t that hard to do), Loggins wins out over the Lady Gaga song that signals the ending credits, “Hold My Hand” (though “Hold My Dick” would be so much more apropos).
Directed by Joseph Kosinski (who also pulled his weight by directing the music video for the aforementioned Lady G song) this time around, Cruise likely felt comfortable enough for him to take on the precious remake because they had already worked together on 2013’s Oblivion. Which came out the year after a dark pall was cast on pre-production plans for the Top Gun sequel when Tony Scott went ahead and committed suicide—hence the movie’s dedication to him at the end. Yet it’s somehow germane that an “old-timer” (as one of Top Gun’s new characters calls Maverick) like Scott should punch his own ticket in the same hardcore style as other white men of his age group (Anthony Bourdain, Keith Flint, Chris Cornell). Rather than hanging himself, he opted to jump off the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro. Granted, many suspected he chose to kill himself before his cancer did, but still… Even the thought of a Top Gun sequel couldn’t keep him going. And why would it if the entire point was to highlight how much time had passed since Maverick’s first go-around?
From the first scene of dialogue with Maverick talking to Rear Admiral (you can’t make these titles up) Cain (Ed Harris), the latter—“older than water” himself—is quick to enjoy telling his subordinate that “his kind” is extinct and that he’ll soon be replaced by (auto)“pilots” that don’t need to eat, sleep or take a bathroom break. Because heaven forbid a worker should show any such grotesque signs of humanity (as Elon Musk recently pointed out when he said, “Pretend to work somewhere else” to his employees). The other topic discussed being that Maverick is still “just a captain,” even if a highly-decorated one. And Cain wants to know “why that is.” A not-so-polite way of inferring that he’s too much of an untrustworthy wild card to have ever established himself beyond the title of his arrogant 80s days. With that sting, Cain delivers another one: the only role left for him within the navy is to, once again, try his hand at being a Top Gun instructor. Because, evidently, he only lasted two months after we last left him at the conclusion of the 1986 edition.
Which is somewhat surprising since he seemed so eager to and sure of taking on the job. After all, as Ehud Yonay, the author of the source material for the movie, phrased it in his article, “For the last two weeks they’ve been training at Top Gun, Miramar’s internationally known Navy Fighter Weapons School. Just getting here was the ultimate break. Only the best young flyers in a squadron ever make it, and they have already raced past most fighter pilots their age. If they play it right and look sharp, they might even get invited back as Top Gun instructors—which is as high as a fighter pilot can get.” Not for Maverick, it would appear. In truth, being asked to go back there feels like an insult and a demotion. But he would still rather do that than “retire” (a.k.a. be forced out entirely). Because, as he tells his love interest of the moment, Penny (Jennifer Connelly): being a pilot isn’t what he does, it’s who he is. Another case in point of how Americans—especially of the boomer generation—are still way too obsessed with work and its supposed definement of who they are. Just another fun little perk of capitalistic brainwashing.
With no options left, Maverick thusly returns to North Island. Where the same title card (“Fightertown, USA”) and image pulled from the original movie occurs, itself pulled from Yonay’s words: “…the first thing they see at the end of the runway is a huge red sign stenciled the length of a low, 300-foot-long building: WELCOME TO FIGHTERTOWN, U.S.A. Though the call sign of Miramar is ‘Home of the Pacific Fleet Fighters,’ Fightertown is handier and far more appropriate, since the entire mission of this sprawling 24,000-acre base—wedged inside a fork formed as I-15 and I-805 cross diagonally some fifteen miles north of San Diego—is to primp and fuss over several hundred fighter jocks so that when the time comes and they’re staring down the missile racks of a Russian MiG, they are primed and ready.” Unfortunately for those who wanted to call out Russia directly as an enemy again (as the U.S. was so freely allowed to do in the 80s), the “bad” country must be kept vaguer this time. But whoever it is has opted to house a secret uranium warehouse indicative of their eventual nuclear launching intentions (sounds like North Korea shade, but who knows?—so many people want to blow up the world nowadays).
Showing up to present himself before Vice Admiral Beau “Cyclone” Simpson (Jon Hamm), it is quickly made known to Maverick that he was not only not Simpson’s first choice, he wasn’t on the list at all. To rub further salt in the wound, during the presentation of the mission he’ll be tasked with teaching, he makes a “quip” in response to how much older models of planes have been held onto by the organization. Giving Simpson the chance to jibe, “Not the only old relics we’re holding onto” as he looks directly at Maverick. But again, trying to write him off as irrelevant in the present is something Yonay already unwittingly defended in that 1983 article when he wrote,
Even in this age of remote-control, pushbutton warfare, the survival and effectiveness of the entire U.S. Pacific Fleet rests on a few dozen young men getting themselves catapulted off a flight deck and hanging it in the skies against numerically superior, land-based enemy planes. ‘It’s like in the old days,’ says Commander Jack (“Gringo”) Snyder, leader of the Wolfpack, ‘when one knight from each side would come out and they’d joust, one on a white horse and one on a black horse.’… [Gringo] knows that even the greatest air battle is a series of individual duels—that, while a dozen pilots may blast off a carrier at one time, once they get up there they are alone, hurtling through enemy air at 750 miles an hour and tilting against tiny motes of silver that zoom out of the blue to become fire-spitting machines.
This is precisely what Maverick wants to teach his new students, consisting of the purported “best of the best” in the form of Jake “Hangman” Seresin (Glen Powell, who once appeared in another movie with Connelly: Stuck in Love), Robert “Bob” Floyd (Lewis Pullman), Natasha “Phoenix” Trace (Monica Barbaro), Reuben “Payback” Fitch (Jay Ellis) and Mickey “Fanboy” Garcia (Danny Ramirez). And, last but not least: Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, the spawn of Maverick’s deceased wingman. Maverick encounters all six of them at the local haunt where he once joined in on a rendition of “Great Balls of Fire” with Goose (and if the song was touch-and-go then because of the man who sang it, you can surely imagine how uncomfortable it is now). What’s more, if you were expecting that scene to come back, you’d be right, for Top Gun: Maverick—as “modernized” as it is—still doesn’t show restraint on the cornball moments that also populated the original. The only time this actually works effectively is when Iceman (Val Kilmer) makes a cameo to tell Maverick “it’s time to let go.” Of his belief that his entire identity is tied to being “up there.” Being that Kilmer lost his voice to throat cancer in real life, the scene accommodated his vocal limitations, using AI to recreate the sound of his voice for the few lines he was given.
As for Penny Benjamin, she’s also technically a “legacy character” like Iceman. For she didn’t come entirely out of nowhere just as a means to sub in for Charlie’s absence. She was built from some off-handed lines of dialogue about the “admiral’s daughter,” notably when Goose’s wife, Carole (Meg Ryan), teases Maverick that her husband “told me all about the time you went ballistic with Penny Benjamin.” Ah, Armed Forces innuendo.
Regarding the reason why Meg Ryan was excluded as well, Kosinski claimed, “I didn’t want every storyline to always be looking backwards. It was important to introduce some new characters.” This meant excluding some very specific characters from the original, including McGillis and Ryan. And the absence of these women altogether—with Charlie not mentioned at all and Carole being killed off—is just as ageist as anything derogatorily lobbed at Maverick for the duration of the movie.
Hangman is the first to comment upon Maverick’s “washed up” air at the bar, delighting in how Penny has rung the bell to announce that Mav will be paying for a round of drinks for everyone. This aspect also deriving from the part of the “Top Guns” article that elucidates, “It was no ordinary bell. The Wolfpack had brought it for a purpose, to help uphold the club’s bylaws, which state that a bell should be rung on two occasions—when someone walks into the club with his hat on, or when a customer finds himself behind the bar.”
In Maverick’s case, the rules are updated, and he’s punished by Penny for putting his phone on the bar and likely “disrespecting a lady.” In the same scene, the tension between Rooster and Hangman is accented by the latter’s accusation that he thinks too much. Is always just sitting and waiting in a plane for the right moment that will never come. He then plays Foghat’s “Slow Ride” on the jukebox and declares how much he loves the song before Rooster inevitably sits at the piano and plays “Great Balls of Fire.”
By this time, Mav has been “thrown overboard” from the bar as a result of being unable to pay the tab. Watching Rooster play the Jerry Lee Lewis staple from outside, however, we’re giving the requisite cheesy flashback to when he was singing with Goose that was hyper-maudlin in 1986 and even more so now. Yet it’s all just part of the many things in this movie that Republicans love best. How it’s “fiercely American” and that it doesn’t bother with “woke” posturing. Save for the tokenism of Phoenix, Payback and Fanboy as pilots. Enough boxes ticked on addressing the fact that we have actually left the 80s. Much to the dismay of many conservatives still clinging to those Reagan years when Biff-type white men reigned supreme.
But that doesn’t mean Kosinski and the writers of Top Gun: Maverick want us to forget about the decade that permitted Top Gun’s infamous volleyball scene. For this version of a sports outing, OneRepublic’s “I Ain’t Worried” acts as the new iteration of Kenny Loggins’ “Playing With the Boys,” both songs designed to “fit the mood” for a “team-building activity.” In the 80s, that was volleyball. Now, it’s something more tried-and-true: football.
What’s also tried-and-true for Cruise is some rather lackluster attempts at hetero sex scenes. And the “sex scene” that Mav has with Charlie isn’t totally unlike the rather chaste one he shares with Penny—that is to say, completely banal. Yet it must be enough to give him the strength to keep going with his teaching gig, no matter how much he wishes he could be the one to go on this mission as well. Knowing, in a reverse form of ageism against the youths, that he’s the only one with the real grit to carry it off. And no matter how much he tries to describe to them how brutal it will be, they can’t really know until they experience it. As one Lieutenant Commander in Yonay’s article demands, “How do you explain 6.5 Gs [six and a half times the force of gravity]—that you’re sitting there and you weigh 200 pounds, but when you turn for that bad guy you suddenly weigh more than 1,300? Or how if you pull too many Gs a lot of times you start to black out, and how do you explain that you were in an airplane flying around and you blacked out?” This is what happens to one of Mav’s students on a test run alone.
The frequent practices that so flagrantly promote another highly outdated phenomenon from the twentieth century: fossil fuel emissions. And while no one has yet found a way to truly stamp this out, it’s already gotten to the point in our society where so openly and freely farting out fuel into the atmosphere is the equivalent of how ridiculous people who still smoke look knowing what we all do about its effects.
Yonay was unaware of how well he was illuminating just what a bane the Armed Forces are to the environment when he said, “Yogi had flown jets in flight school—the T-2 Buckeye and A-4 Skyhawk—but moving up to the F-14 Tomcat [not to be confused with Cruise’s ex-couple name, TomKat] meant crossing the magic line that separates the men from the boys, like first-time sex, glorious and terrifying. The difference is the afterburner, an engine component that at the pull of a throttle begins to burn huge amounts of fuel at incredible speed, resulting in a burst of power that no ordinary jet engine can duplicate and no plane but a fighter ever needs.” That “need” being just one of many detriments to the ever-depleted ozone layer. And perhaps this is one regard in which contempt for a man’s age is understandable. For it is the old guard methods that keep preventing new, more viable ways of doing things from ever seeping through the literally militant cracks of “what it means to be American.”
For those still idealizing Top Gun, that means toxic masculinity, environmental decimation and a mockery of any perceived weakness (including, of course, age). As such, this is certainly not a movie that another 80s icon-turned-anti-ageism-crusader named Madonna would bother to fuck with, nor would she have deigned to soundtrack it then or now, as the inferior imitation of herself has.
