In the Flesh: Top Gun: Maverick

The world would be a better place if Top Gun: Maverick hadn’t been made. Its relentless fellation of the Navy’s imperialist self-mythologizing viciousness is a stain not just on every man, woman, and child in America but on the art form of cinema itself. It revels in the hellish perversion of mankind’s dream of flight into a tool of mass slaughter, and its slave-owning star makes of himself a perfect poster boy for the kind of directionless, violent young men who crave the structure, proxy fathering, and opportunities for brutality that come with military enlistment. It cloaks its xenophobic anxieties at the thought of non-Americans wielding nuclear power in an anonymizing placelessness that only makes the naval operation around which the film revolves more dehumanizing and callous. It is thus with a heavy heart I must inform you that the resultant movie — which functions substantially, if not primarily, as propaganda for one of the most destructive fascist forces in human history — slaps really fucking hard.

From the jump the movie’s love of its subject matter is clear, the delight it takes in things moving very fast infectious and exhilarating. We perch via Go-Pro just ahead of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) as he guns his motorcycle along an access road, a sort of Lawrence of Arabia riff brought to life by the speed-blurred fisheye and Cruise’s smile, still bright and charmingly reckless thirty-five years after the original film helped cement him as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. He remains a magnetic screen presence, and his ability to project the kind of complex emotions Maverick deals with in his eponymous sequel — surrogate fatherhood, failure, inadequacy — has matured considerably since the early days of his stardom. His chemistry with love interest Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connolly) and co-star Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of his late flight partner, keeps things engaging even when the film slows down — which it does just often enough to sketch out a few emotional arcs on its way to the main event.

And shit, what an event it is. The training for that final flight alone is grueling, and the film pushes the idea of its impossibility to the point where it becomes reasonable to wonder if this will be the end of Maverick, whether he’s undone and grounded by the tactically conservative meddling of his extremely handsome superior officer Admiral Beau “Cyclone” Simpson (John Hamm), or shot down over some nameless rogue state’s uranium enrichment facility. The sense of challenge is overwhelming, the release of pressure as the whole operation nearly flies apart and then crashes triumphantly back together in a trench run attack sequence as tightly edited and intercut as anything since A New Hope’s original rendition of the concept so energizing I actually pumped my fist in the air at the moment of triumph. It’s real cinema, real planes moving at breakneck speeds, real explosions shredding earth and tarmac, and after tasting that infectious hit of 90s action blockbuster again I don’t see how anyone could ever go back to the canned imitation slop of the past two decades. God damn.