The story is cleverer and more gripping, the dialogue is sharper and funnier, the relationships are richer, the aerial stunts are more likely to make you queasy. 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).Īnd yet the new film improves on the old one in every respect. 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. 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.
Turning Red: 'Life-affirming' new PixarĪmazingly, Top Gun: Maverick bucks the trend. After all, The Matrix: Resurrections and Ghostbusters: Afterlife had their fans (I wasn't one of them) and Star Wars: The Force Awakens was a hit, but none of them matched the decades-old blockbusters they were straining so obviously to emulate. 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. (Climate change? What climate change?) It was also the film that turned the fresh-faced Tom Cruise into a superstar.
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. Top Gun was one of the most fundamentally 1980s-ish of all the films made in the 1980s.
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