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Top Gun: Maverick Movie Review

Top Gun: Maverick is a 2022 action film directed by Joseph Kosinski and starring Tom Cruise. It is better than the original, but still weak.

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“He would always resent me for what I did.

Why should he resent her too?“

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Thirty years of service leads Maverick to train a group of elite Top Gun graduates to prepare for a high-profile mission while Maverick battles his past demons. I’d dreaded watching this movie and I didn’t want to watch it, but eventually I had to as it was nominated for Best Picture inexplicably so. When all is said and done, it’s better than expected and it’s clearly much stronger than that awful original, but still I would have been fine not seeing it as well.

This is your standard blockbuster movie that heavily hinges on nostalgia. There is a lot of emotional manipulation in the story regarding the death of Goose and how that impacted Maverick and the entire story with his son Rooster and his relationship with Maverick was predictable, but at least the movie had some sort of emotional engagement and storytelling, something that the original never had.

The characterization is, thus, better than you would expect, especially of Maverick himself who gets to grapple with his mortality, and along with him the star himself. Tom Cruise is very good in the role, there is no doubt about it. He has a lot of charisma and star power and he got a meatier role than usual, but I still find him overly cocky and unlikable.

Others are solid, though not as memorable. Miles Teller as Rooster is underdeveloped, though he obviously gave a strong performance. Jennifer Connelly got saddled with an uninteresting female love interest role while Glen Powell exuded genuine star quality in a minor role. He has something, so Hollywood should use him better in the future.

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Top Gun: Maverick is superbly shot and the fact that it was shot using these planes on air was remarkable. Receiving an Oscar nomination for screenplay and not cinematography is ludicrous and it just goes to show that the Academy is still capable of making these ridiculous choices. The movie has great effects, a superb score that is uplifting and fun, and it’s overall an audio-visual spectacle. The problem here is that the script is very mediocre, the dialogue is frequently cringe-worthy and cheesy and the deliberately ambiguous geopolitics on display were very lazy. This is still an American movie promoting the strength of their military and the war effort, so you cannot really evade its propagandistic intentions.