Top Gun: Maverick

Top Gun is the story of a talented young American pilot slowly overcoming a variety of (largely domestic) threats to his ego and sense of self. The pilot's real name, Pete Mitchell, is viewed throughout Tony Scott's film as a poisoned chalice; his hot shot mentality contextualised as a grievous threat to the group cohesion so prized by any military unit. He's double-damned and not to be trusted. Tom Cruise's younger Maverick is able to tidy away these nagging concerns only after learning the sealed document-level truth of his father's passing: he died a hero. This knowledge completes Maverick, allowing him to rise to the challenges set before him, becoming a team player in the process. His anointment isn't how many enemy planes he has shot down though, rather it is when his biggest rival states that he now trusts Mitchell. Joseph Kosinski's Top Gun: Maverick then, a sequel that has taken 36 years to follow its predecessor, is about this master returning to his calling. 

This Maverick has long been the finished article. Age and an unwillingness to follow a typical Navy career path has meant that he has drifted away from his true purpose - dogfighting - becoming the human component in much more esoteric, experimental, aircraft. His excellence has been folded into a scientific strata - he's human hard data, put in place to balance other unaccountable variables. His reliability is beyond question. Kosinski's sequel speaks with this sweeping language; that of a sports film. Massed air attacks are described and drilled in terms of pure objective and their prospective dangers, rather than how these strikes will then go on to influence a spinning world. Like the Scott film before it, Top Gun: Maverick is curiously apolitical in how it approaches its geopolitical unrest. Although clearly ex-Soviet Bloc in terms of gunships deployed, no clear names or locations are offered up for this enemy. 

Nameless but described with a clear cultural symbolism (one completely centred around military hardware), the country refining uranium deep in missile mountain might as well be a Soviet Union that never fell into economic hardship. Maverick's foe is a transcontinental mega power that reaches beyond the Sea of Okhotsk, deep into American Pacific territories, able to scramble next-generation aircraft that outclasses the planes fielded by the richest nation on our planet. This gap in technological prowess is a key building block in Top Gun: Maverick, one that allows the film to trespass into even more exciting and fantastical realms than its prequel. When the chips are down, Cruise's character is so supernaturally talented that he is able to render any advantage wrung out of aeronautical innovation effectively null. He doesn't just pilot his aircraft, he has a symbiotic relationship with the machinery. This concept is hammered into the audience via IMAX footage of a purple, straining, Cruise riding billion dollar planes so hard that they seem to be about to fall apart.