Top Gun

Prior to receiving the Palme, which wasn't expected, he was given a tribute reel before the film played. As a prelude, French fighter jets took the sky ...

He also emphasized that Top Gun: Maverick heading to streaming was never an option while movie theaters were closed during the pandemic. Top Gun: Maverick‘s next stop is in London for a Royal Screening tomorrow. It’s been 36 years since Top Gun and we had to hold this for two years because of the pandemic.”

That theme is then replaced (as it was in the earlier film) by Kenny Loggins's power-pop classic “Danger Zone” as we cut to a montage of fighter jets launching ...

Teller, whose achingly doleful performance in Kosinski’s 2017 firefighting drama Only the Brave was the heart and soul of that film, brings a contemptuous edge to Rooster that convincingly cuts Maverick, and perhaps by extension, Cruise, down to size. It’s a teary good-bye, the kind we’ve seen countless times in movies about the military, but the grieving expression on Connelly’s face suggests that Maverick is already a ghost. Gone is the image of the happy warrior, replaced by the grim spectacle of drone warfare, and street battles, and insurgencies, and long, agonizing, bloody stalemates. As a result, for most of this affecting scene, Maverick’s is the only voice in the room, underlining the character’s loneliness. Maverick subtly nods to all this with an early standoff between Maverick and a drone-happy general played by Ed Harris as well as constant reminders that the success of the central mission will depend on the people flying the planes and not on the technology itself. It would’ve been a no-brainer to have made a sequel to Top Gun right after it became the biggest movie of 1986. Even his longtime studio, Paramount, dropped him, citing his less-than-stellar public image (though he has continued to make Mission: Impossible movies, and now Top Gun: Maverick, with the studio). Perhaps not coincidentally, Hollywood was also losing interest in the kind of star-driven vehicles that had helped build Cruise’s career in favor of franchise pictures. And, of course, much of Maverick was shot in real fighter jets with real actors enduring real g-forces on their faces and bodies. After the actor agreed to make the original Top Gun, he and a team of writers worked to polish the script, adding a missing-in-action, larger-than-life father to Maverick’s psychological portfolio — a specter that would then proceed to reappear, in some form or another, in subsequent Cruise films. That theme is then replaced (as it was in the earlier film) by Kenny Loggins’s power-pop classic “Danger Zone” as we cut to a montage of fighter jets launching off and landing on an aircraft carrier. In the original Top Gun, directed by Tony Scott, this montage served a narrative purpose: It set up a scene involving Tom Cruise’s young fighter pilot, Maverick, flipping off an enemy MiG in the skies over the Indian Ocean. It’s a moment that encapsulates the whole movie. The sequel, directed by Joseph Kosinski, begins pretty much exactly as the first picture did, with a modified version of Faltermeyer’s theme playing against onscreen text introducing us to the elite training program for the Navy’s best pilots.