Top Gun: Maverick

The technology may be new but this is a very old-fashioned affair, building on the legacy of its 1986 predecessor with wit and grace.

The martinet Admiral Simpson (Jon Hamm), in overall command of the mission, thoroughly disapproves of Maverick and is looking for any opportunity to fire him. There is simmering Oedipal tension between “Rooster” and “Maverick”. The veteran instructor is determined not to see the newcomer share his father’s fate. There’s a wonderful scene early on, with Cruise in the bar owned by Penny (Jennifer Connelly), one of his old flames. Instead, under Admiral Kazinsky’s instructions, Maverick is dispatched to mission headquarters to train up a detachment of graduates, the “best of the best”, for a near-impossible task to blow up an Iranian uranium enrichment plant. Unlike his old friend/antagonist Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer), who is now an admiral, Pete remains a humble captain. Arriving in cinemas 36 years after the original, it defies cynicism and confirms Tom Cruise’s status as Hollywood’s “mission leader” when it comes to blockbusters.

California's economy took off with Paramount Pictures' Top Gun: Maverick as its wingman, according to new data from the studio.

- More than $1.2 million spent on hardware and lumber supplies. California is fighting back with a uniquely targeted tax credit program, not to mention being home to the best crews, talent, infrastructure, locations, weather and everything else that makes us the world’s entertainment production capital.” California Film Commission executive director Colleen Bell said of Top Gun: Maverick, “The film had a very positive impact on our economy, bringing production jobs and spending to regions across the state. We look forward to our continuing partnership and support from the state so that Paramount can continue to produce amazing projects of scale and excitement.” Productions like Top Gun: Maverick create jobs and support local businesses, while also highlighting our industry’s proud partnership with the U.S. military, which is particularly fitting as we celebrate Military Appreciation Month and Memorial Day in the coming weeks.” California’s economy took off with Paramount Pictures’ Top Gun: Maverick as its wingman, according to new data from the studio.

Feel the need for speed in a flimsy but fun fighter plane sequel to the iconic 80s classic.

In fact, a much truer Top Gun sequel was actually made a few years ago: Good Kill, in which Ethan Hawke plays a Cruise-esque fighter pilot exiled to drone duty, losing his mind in a metal box in the Las Vegas desert as he presses a button and kills civilians thousands of miles away. But the main problem is that the mission is so improbably specific to the needs of the plot. Matthew Modine and Bryan Adams were among the '80s stars who declined to be involved in the original because of its jingoistic tone, which was a post-Vietnam reassertion of American military (and masculine) might. There's no disguising that a lot of the story is a rerun of the original. So the over-the-top action is balanced with appealing humor and even a little pathos in Cruise's relationship with the younger flyers and his rekindled romance with a bar owner. Unlike recent blockbusters (ahem, Marvel movies) which distance you from the action with clearly impossible camera angles and over-the-top CG effects, Top Gun: Maverick uses the visual language of the original, the camera jammed claustrophobically into a cockpit or shaking as it struggles to keep up with a jet screaming past.

May 13, 2022 at 4:45 a.m.. By Mark Kennedy | Associated Press. Early on in “Top Gun: Maverick,” Tom Cruise hops on his sleek motorcycle ...

But she’s also not a push-over for on-again-off-again Maverick and, in a key scene, she’s the comfortable pilot of a boat and he’s the clueless one. “The future is coming and you’re not in it,” Maverick is told by Ed Harris, playing a humorless admiral. Worst, he’s called “pops.” What is remarkable is that Cruise looks to have indeed found a way to thwart time. This is Cruise at his most Cruise-iest, coiled, sure and arrogant, teeth gleaming in the sunshine. It’s not weighed down by its past like the last “Ghostbusters” sequel, but rather soars by using the second to answer and echo issues with the first. Early on in “Top Gun: Maverick,” Tom Cruise hops on his sleek motorcycle, wearing Aviator sunglasses and a leather jacket with patches, and speeds into a time machine.

'Top Gun: Maverick' star Jennifer Connelly talks about working with Tom Cruise for the first time and learning to tend bar for the film.

I was 14 when I made that movie. “That movie had a profound impact on people.” We had a working beer tap on set, and I spent a lot of time pouring. I do have a nickname, but from way back when I was in college. The boat was at an impossible angle, moving so fast, and we had to play the scene at the same time. Despite the optics of shirtless volleyball games and locker room sparring, you can’t make a “Top Gun” movie without a strong and emotionally centered woman.

Say what you like about the 59-year-old action star, but with Top Gun: Maverick Tom Cruise has resuscitated the summer blockbuster in emphatic fashion.

“So I had to get them up to be able to sustain high Gs. Because they have to act in the plane. According to an interview with Empire (via USA Today) from last year, in which they spoke to super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, the actor “put in a request” to fly the actual F-18, ultimately denied clearance by the Navy. But there was a compromise: instead, IMAX cameras were installed into the cockpits of F-18s flown by Navy pilots qualified to, you know, actually handle a multi-million dollar military machine. Kinetic event cinema that you can feel, that makes you feel, unrestrained by the uncanny valley of greenscreens and impassive CGI.

In honor of Top Gun day, the team behind Top Gun: Maverick has launched a trivia challenge available on Instagram or Facebook Messenger.

From every trailer and new piece of marketing, Top Gun: Maverick appears to be another shining example of the movie-going experience. In honor of Top Gun Day, May 13, Paramount Pictures is letting fans take the Flight School Trivia Challenge on Facebook Messenger and Instagram. Now if you think you're a Top Gun expert, you can finally put your skills to the test in a brand-new trivia game.

Fans of Top Gun have had to wait 36 years for the long-promised sequel to the 1986 film - but with Maverick finally flying into cinemas next week, does the ...

But the movie treads a delicate balance between the old and the new. It raises a wry smile when Maverick is told towards the start of the film "the future is coming, and you're not in it" - little did the cast and crew know that the film would come out years after it was scheduled to. His kind will be extinct soon as new remote technology negates the need for pilots.

With a smarter story, funnier dialogue and more nausea-inducing aerial stunts, Top Gun: Maverick outpaces the 1986 original, writes Nicholas Barber.

There was death in the 1986 Top Gun, of course, and there was a combat mission tacked on at the end, but for most of the film the biggest risk faced by Pete was that Iceman might sneer at him in the locker room. There is even a drop of bad blood between Pete and his old flame Penny the Conveniently Single Bar Owner (Jennifer Connelly), but she is better suited to him than the first film's love interest, Charlie (Kelly McGillis, who doesn't get a mention, let alone a cameo appearance). The tentative romance between Pete and Penny is predictable, but quite touching because there is chemistry and history between them, and an awareness that they aren't in the first flush of youth. The admiral in charge of the school, Cyclone (Jon Hamm, doing a good line in goggle-eyed exasperation), doesn't approve of Pete's methods because he fears they might compromise the mission. The navy wants to send in some of its own jets to blow up the plant, and so 12 of Top Gun's finest graduates are brought back to brush up on their dog-fighting skills. Despite what he said in the original film, he hasn't spent much of the last 30-odd years as a Top Gun instructor. And yet the new film improves on the old one in every respect. In Top Gun: Maverick, the stakes are higher because we know that some of them will be going on a hazardous mission that they might not survive. Directed by Joseph Kosinski (who made another belated 1980s sequel, Tron: Legacy), and co-written by Cruise's regular Mission: Impossible director, Christopher McQuarrie, it's a sincere homage to the original Top Gun. The opening blurb and aircraft-carrier montage are pretty much identical to their 1986 equivalents; it closes with a dedication to Tony Scott, who died in 2012; and in between it keeps referring back to the characters and incidents of its predecessor. Top Gun was one of the most fundamentally 1980s-ish of all the films made in the 1980s. The plot outline is similar, too, in that it is set in the navy's elite flying school – aka Top Gun – where a group of cocky "best of the best" pilots all have such superhero-worthy call signs as Hangman (Glenn Powell) and Phoenix (Monica Barbaro). Glossy, superficial and drenched in soft-rock anthems, Tony Scott's aerobatic male-bonding movie was a celebration of US militarism, expensive hardware and the burning of oceans of fossil fuels. But times have changed since 1986, so to bring back Cruise as the US Navy's Pete "Maverick" Mitchell this far into the 21st Century was always going to be – to quote another of his 1980s hits – a risky business.

Cruise presides over some surprising differences from his first outing as the navy pilot hotshot in a film that's missing the homoerotic tensions of the 80s ...

Teller has to be a tough guy, so his late father Goose is remembered by this film as more of an alpha than he actually was: in fact, Goose was a nerdier and more retiring type, closer to this film’s bespectacled comedy turn Bob (Lewis Pullman). Glen Powell plays an arrogant young pilot, call-sign Hangman, who has the burden of incarnating the big-headedness of both the younger Iceman and the younger Maverick. Weirder still, it is actually less progressive on gender issues than the original film, which did after all put a woman in charge: astrophysicist Charlotte Blackwood, played by Kelly McGillis, was the trainer (inspired by real-life Pentagon official Christine Fox). Now it’s Maverick in charge and there is just the one female pilot under his instruction: Phoenix, a thin role for Monica Barbaro. McGillis has evidently not been invited back and her character is never mentioned. But where, oh where, is the towel-round-the-waist, semi-nude locker-room intensity between the guys? Despite his badass attitude, he’s respected by the real flyers and loathed by the pointy-headed brass, and is protected by his enduring bromance with former classmate and rival Iceman, who is now an admiral. Almost 40 years on from the first film, which was directed by Tony Scott, Maverick is still speedy, less needy – more centred and calmer, in fact, but still in humungous shape and in love with flying. Commanding officer Cyclone (Jon Hamm) has the ticklish diplomatic task of telling Maverick to train this new generation of adorable hotheads without joining them in the skies himself.

Tom Cruise is back in the air in the fan-friendly legacy sequel Top Gun: Maverick.

This is where diehard fans, who are sure to be giddy from having their nostalgia joy buttons pushed for the length of the movie, and the rest of us may part ways, with Maverick striving for drama but settling for sentimentality. On the other hand, Cruise is as effortlessly charismatic and watchable as ever in the role he may be most remembered for, and the movie fills the screen and passes the time reasonably quickly. And then there are the aerial sequences, in which Top Gun: Maverick truly comes to full, stunning, jaw-dropping life. They’re needed again for an urgent mission: six of them must fly into a hazardous, narrow path between two mountains and launch missiles directly at a suspected enemy’s underground uranium laboratory, which is of course guarded by enemy fighters and rocket launchers (the enemy is never identified and politics are kept carefully out of the story, but the landscape sure looks like North Korea). It plays exceptionally well as large-scale summer fare meant to be seen on the big screen (we recommend IMAX). At the same time, the things that people disliked about Top Gun—the one-dimensional characters, the maudlin melodrama, and the montages of military porn that play almost like Navy recruitment videos—still remain. Top Gun: Maverick is probably the best possible follow-up that fans of the late Tony Scott’s original 1986 movie—now very much considered a classic—could hope for.

Nimbly mixing nostalgia and full-throttle action, "Top Gun: Maverick" soars higher than it has any right to, constructing a mostly terrific sequel 36 years ...

Because while you could watch Maverick's heroics in the comfort of home, like the man said, the big screen is where he belongs. Even the seemingly tired plot of Maverick carrying around guilt over Goose all these years, and fretting about adding his kid to that wreckage, works unexpectedly well. on the early cusp of his movie stardom, but he demonstrates that even as an older guy there's still plenty left in the tank.

This long-delayed sequel mostly exists as a tribute to its enduring star.

But in the vacuum of Maverick’s 130 minute run, a disarming wistfulness, and a friendliness, give interesting shape to what could have been mere pointless rehash. There is much more focus on risk; the specter of death hangs heavy over the film, both an incident past (RIP Goose) and the potential for future tragedy on what looks to be a suicide mission. Maverick is certainly fetishistic about its flying death machines, but the film is giving slightly less of the recruiting hard-sell. But time and time again, there’s ol’ Mav (and ol’ Cruise) defying obsolescence and showing these pretenders what it means to be a true hero. Time and time again, Cruise’s Captain Mitchell (call sign Maverick) is told that he is a dinosaur, soon to be replaced by computers and simple mortality. And what of the oldsters?

Tom Cruise settles back into the pilot's seat for a nostalgic last hurrah. 'Top Gun: Maverick'. Source: Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer ...

That said, it remains very easy to enjoy Cruise’s roguish charm, with the veteran actor finding some emotional shading to a man who feels like a fossil. What is both moving and limiting about the backwards-looking Top Gun: Maverick is that, like its hero, the sequel does not want to listen to that advice, either. One of his pupils is Rooster (Teller), the son of Maverick’s closest friend and flying partner Goose, who died during Top Gun. Rooster has never forgiven Maverick, but they must find common cause if they are to complete their mission. We do not learn much about the other characters — even Rooster is not particularly well-developed — so that the focus can be on Maverick’s quest for closure. Featuring a rousing finale — two of them, actually — and substantial nostalgic pleasures, the new film can’t quite balance its desire to be both wistful and escapist, knowingly cheesy and surprisingly touching. The seemingly ageless star returns as the brave, reckless Navy pilot who has never forgiven himself for the death of his best friend, a lingering pain he hopes to remedy when he becomes an instructor for the son of his fallen comrade.

With just over two weeks until Top Gun: Maverick hits theaters, star Glenn Powell revealed his unconventional method of reading reviews: shirtless.

Premiere: Paris was clad in a sparkling gown while posing alongside her boyfriend, along with other snaps from the special day It’s gonna be a good day.' Paris was clad in a sparkling gown while posing alongside her boyfriend, along with other snaps from the special day.

Sequel to 1986 fighter pilot classic is released in cinemas later this month.

See it on the biggest screen possible. Until then, who can be blamed for getting swept up by a film this damned fun?” However, while she praises the film’s technical ambition and action sequences, she criticises the film’s treatment of the female characters from the original, writing: “Neither McGillis nor Meg Ryan, who played Rooster’s mother, make any kind of return.

A breathless, gravity and logic-defying sequel.

And because this mode is clearly shared by the entirety of the cast—from a memorable Ed Harris that begs for more screen time to the always great Glen Powell as the alluringly overconfident “ Hangman,” Greg Tarzan Davis as “Coyote,” Jay Ellis as “ Payback,” Danny Ramirez as “Fanboy,” Monica Barbaro as “ Phoenix,” and Lewis Pullman as “Bob”—“Top Gun: Maverick” runs fully on its enthralling on-screen harmony at times. Still, the action sequences—all the low-altitude flights, airborne dogfights as well as Cruise on a motorcycle donned in his original Top Gun leather jacket—are likewise the breathtaking stars of “Maverick,” often accompanied by Harold Faltermeyer’s celebratory original score (aided by cues from Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe). Reportedly, all the flying scenes—a pair of which are pure hell-yes moments for Cruise—were shot in actual U.S. Navy F/A-18s, for which the cast had to be trained for during a mind-boggling process. After a title card that explains what “Top Gun” is—the identical one that introduced us to the world of crème-de-la-crème Navy pilots in 1986—we find Maverick in a role on the fringes of the US Navy, working as an undaunted test pilot against the familiar backdrop of Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone.” You won’t be surprised that soon enough, he gets called on a one-last-job type of mission as a teacher to a group of recent Top Gun graduates. And if Rooster’s understandable distaste of him wasn’t enough (despite Maverick’s protective instincts towards him), there are skeptics of Maverick’s credentials— Jon Hamm’s Cyclone, for instance, can’t understand why Maverick’s foe-turned-friend Iceman ( Val Kilmer, returning with a tearjerker of a part) insists on him as the teacher of the mission. In a different package, all the brouhaha jingoism and proud fist-shaking seen in “Top Gun: Maverick” could have been borderline insufferable. In that regard, you will be right at home with “Top Gun: Maverick,” director Joseph Kosinski’s witty adrenaline booster that allows its leading producer to be exactly what he is—a star—while upping the emotional and dramatic stakes of its predecessor with a healthy (but not overdone) dose of nostalgia.