Top Gun
TOP GUN: MAVERICK
With Top Gun: Maverick now released all over the world, our team is excited that a true classic film has been brought to the modern era. We are lucky to have Top Gun within our licensing portfolio, allowing us to make stunning designs using all your favourite characters in the action pact movie.
Listed below are 5 reasons why we think Top Gun is an unmissable experience:
It feels like an analog movie in a digital era
Top Gun: Maverick resurrects the notions of a movie made in the 80s but brought to the 21st century. The movie radiates old-school sincerity throughout, refusing to undercut its emotive scenes with a tiresomely self-conscious quip. Although there are jokes, brilliant ones, throughout the movie, they’re timed in such a way that chimes with the narrative, and it never feels like the movie is getting self-consciously embarrassed about its mushiness on the audience’s behalf. The pacing of director Joseph Kosinski’s editing is incredible, allowing us to take in the various character arcs and set pieces without boredom setting in.
Tom Cruise re-asserts his position as the chief aviator
It’s been 36 years since Cruise last bestrode the screen as the grinning Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell. The original Top Gun cemented Tom Cruise as a brand in and of his own right, and he seems to be part of a dying breed of old-school movie star. The opening scene in Top Gun: Maverick reveals an isolated Maverick working on a prop aircraft in a Mojave Desert hangar. It can be seen as a self-referential statement as to who Cruise really is. He’s long been an actor fiercely, even scarily, dedicated to the practical craft of acting and stuntwork, a technician who may threaten to get lost amidst the CGI clutter of modern-day filmmaking. But it’s the combination of that self-mocking humour, combined with a surprisingly emotive sense of Maverick’s vulnerabilities that really sells us on Maverick’s return.
The in-flight footage is truly gripping
Lensed by Claudio Miranda in IMAX, the aerial sequences in Top Gun: Maverick make the original movie look like a child’s simulation. With the advance of IMAX technology, drone footage and digital capture, the interior of an F-14 Tomcat fighter jet has never felt more tactile. The film is goosed by the fact that this was all done for real. When we can relax into the idea of practical effects and stunts, it invests us more in the drama. We’re made all the more aware that actors and stunt persons went the extra mile, potentially risking life and limb in the process. By threading in the aerial sequences bit by bit over the course of two hours, Kosinski and Cruise have us anticipating the remarkable climactic sequence long before it arrives. And when it does, rest assured, one’s heart will be in one’s mouth.
The young cast members inhabit their roles in fascinating ways
Without giving anything away, Miles Teller is superb as the conflicted Rooster, the son of Maverick’s late wingman Goose (Anthony Edwards). The on-screen history between Rooster and Maverick adds soulful depth to Top Gun: Maverick, albeit in broad strokes ways with massive, emotive close-ups often filling the screen in the manner of a Spaghetti Western. However, this is part and parcel of what makes the movie so charming. Not to be outdone, Glen Powell also shines in his role as Hangman, the cocky and presumptive heir apparent to Maverick’s one-time Top Gun crown. And yet even his character gets moments of sensitivity and heartbreak.
The soundtrack hits all the right notes
The original Top Gun had Kenny Loggins, Berlin and Harold Faltermeyer. Minus the presence of Berlin, the gang is back together for Top Gun: Maverick, this time bolstered by Oscar-winning Dune composer Hans Zimmer and score producer Lorne Balfe. There are, of course, strategic blasts of Faltermeyer and Loggins’ work, the latter’s ‘Danger Zone’ bound to evoke nostalgic cheers during an early sequence. Appropriately enough, Zimmer and Balfe’s score feels like it was pulled from the early synth era that was contemporaneous with the original Top Gun, washing over us in waves of ambient warmth before occasionally pounding with aggressive drums during the combat sequences. And just when we thought it couldn’t get any better, Lady Gaga arrives to deliver her stirring end credits number, ‘Hold My Hand’, which becomes an anthem of empowering nostalgia. Are we sensing another Best Original Song Oscar in the works?
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