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Last April, Top Gun: Maverick attendees at CinemaCon in Las Vegas had the unique opportunity to see 'Top Gun: Maverick' complete. The reactions couldn't be better, emphasizing the importance of seeing this "perfect blockbuster" on the biggest screen possible. Now, with the premiere closer, the first critics corroborate those opinions, placing Joseph Kosinski's film as one of the best among Tom Cruise's extensive filmography.
One of Top Gun: Maverick crucial questions about this sequel was whether it would respect the essence of that great eighties classic. Linca Marric of The Jewish Chronicle responds to this, assuring that "it is an exciting sequel that will delight fans of the first film". Others have pointed out how similar the two films are, such as USA Today's Brian Truitt, who maintains that "in the first moments, you don't know if you're watching the original movie or a new one." However, there are contrary opinions in this regard. "Fans of (director of the original) Tony Scott may miss that tone of disrepute, vulgar sensibility that made 'Top Gun' such a dreamy, voluptuous tale," said Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times.
With a marked fidelity in terms of essence, all critics agree that this sequel is a better film than the original. "A superior sequel," says David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter. The added serious tone is also highlighted. "'Top Gun: Maverick' is better than the original. It's deeper, it's not corny and it has exciting effects," says Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle. For his part, David Ehrlich, of IndieWire, has declared that "if 'Top Gun' was a funny movie because he invented Tom Cruise, 'Maverick' is a great movie because it immortalizes him."
The current industry tradition of Top Gun: Maverick finding a sequel to everything also includes 'Maverick'. However, critics defend the importance of this in particular. "Few Hollywood reboots can boast this blend of nostalgia, freshness and adrenaline. You'll want to high-five someone on the way out of the theater," explains Time Out's Philip De Semlyen. Independet's Clarisse Loughrey takes a sidelong look at another great franchise: "The film is a true legacy sequel. In the tradition of 'Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens,' it's a carefully reconstructed clone of its predecessor, designed not only to reflect changing tastes and attitudes, but also its star Tom Cruise's rise to a level of fame that borders on the mythological."
Regarding the actors, the vast majority unanimously agree that this is Tom Cruise's best film. "We have arrived, without a doubt, at the most 'Tom Cruise' movie he has ever made," says Robbie Collin of the Daily Telegraph. They corroborate it from IndieWire, who say that "it is 'Tom Cruise: The movie'". Regarding Val Kilmer's return as Iceman, the Hollywood Reporter states that "One of the most emotional elements of the film comes from Kilmer's brief screen time."
Lastly, negative criticism has focused mainly on the low female participation. From The Jewish Chronicle they state that "one would have appreciated a slightly more effective female-centered subplot." Something that they also think from the Los Angeles Times, agreeing that it is the biggest flaw: "Women are few and far between, and even the most prominent receive mostly superficial treatment."
The reviews couldn't be more positive, which further fuels the already existing hype for 'Top Gun: Maverick'. The wait is almost over, as the film opens on May 26.
Spectacular. This is the adjective that best sums up Top Gun: Maverick, the sequel to the popular 1986 classic. The biggest difference between the two is… the viewer. 36 years ago we were not the same, nor was the cinema the same, nor was the world the same. And that shows.
But what will we see in this new Top Gun? For after more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy's finest aviators, Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom Cruise) finds himself where he always wanted to be, pushing the limits as a test pilot and dodging promotions that would land him in land.
While training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialized mission, Maverick stumbles upon Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), badge: "Rooster," the son of Maverick's late friend.
Facing an uncertain future and the ghosts of his past, Top Gun: Maverick must confront his deepest fears as he and his team must accomplish a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice.
Well yes. That's what I thought. In 1986 I was not one of those enchanted by this story of patriotism and testosterone, although I enjoyed good entertainment. That is why I have recently recovered it again and I invite you to do the same (you have it available in some countries on HBO Max).
Top Gun: Maverick will hit Spanish theaters on May 26. It is the sequel to Top Gun: Idols of the air, a mythical film that became a great box office success and was key in Tom Cruise's career. The actor repeats as the protagonist more than 35 years later.
The classic 1986 feature film, directed by Tony Scott (Days of Thunder), can be seen on HBO Max. The film centers on Maverick Mitchell (Tom Cruise), a reckless young pilot who puts his skills to the test at a prestigious Army aviation academy.
The premiere of Top Gun: Maverick was scheduled for July 2019, but the film will finally see the light almost three years later. The production had to deal with multiple delays, first due to the complexity of the flight scenes and later due to the pandemic.
Tom Cruise once again plays Maverick in this new story, who has become one of the best pilots in the army. He will have to train a group of young people for a mission at his aviation academy. Among them is apprentice Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of his deceased partner Goose.
The actors of the sequel to Top Gun had to undergo an exhaustive three-month training for the filming. Cruise, who also serves as the film's producer, explains in a video that they worked with the Navy and the real Top Gun school to establish the best way to record F-18 flights.
The American notes: "The Navy says you have to be able to survive in the water, so we put ourselves through a demanding underwater program." In addition, he himself was the one who designed an aeronautical training for his co-stars.
If you were born in the 80s, it is likely that in that sentimental archeology exercise that is always moving or opening a forgotten drawer in the house you grew up in, you will come across Top Gun. The Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis poster covered countless folders and walls of the MTV generation.
The film has taken more than thirty years to spawn a sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, but a chance meeting with the original poster is all it takes to immediately return to what it was like to be young and an action movie lover in the 80s and 90s. It wasn't the stories, or even the shots, that we loved those movies, but the choppy montage of sensations, the steamy atmospheres, and the pop songs that made us feel like movies like Top Gun were made for us and had a special connection. with our fantasies.
If they didn't give us an identity, they did at least sell us an (unattainable) lifestyle. Obviously there are better films from the eighties than Top Gun if we are objective, such as Raging Bull or Blue Velvet, but thirty years later the poster we meet again is that of Tom Cruise. If Top Gun is not the best movie of the decade, it is the one that best represents it.
One of the reasons why it is so representative of the 80s is due to the efforts of producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer to bring the aesthetic of MTV, which would mark the decade with the series Miami Vice, to the big screen. Flashdance, Hollywood Super Detective, Top Gun and Days of Thunder progressively introduced the aesthetics of the video clip and advertising in the cinema until they consolidated what grumpy critics would call the aesthetics of the cocaine/silicone/gunpowder (and little American flag) of Michael Bay.
His stories were always simple, very simple, like Top Gun, but impact was everything.
Ultimately, Top Gun was the movie that made Tom Cruise a superstar. After making a couple of minor films, he had had his official presentation in Rebels, along with other members of the Brat Pack (Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estévez), but it would be thanks to his role as the indefatigable pilot Pete " Maverick” Mitchell who would become the most sought after of the group.
When Maverick and his friend Goose (Anthony Edwards) arrive at the elite Top Gun flight school, he falls for Kelly McGillis's stunning instructor "Charlie" Blackwood. Something like Officer and gentleman soaring through the skies and another friendly fable of the success of the time, as would Cocktail.
The romance between the two was encapsulated in Berlin's unforgettable melancholic synth pop song, 'Take My Breath Way', released as its own video clip with footage from the film. Just as Lady Gaga has now done with Top Gun: Maverick, but it is enough to compare one and another video clip to see why Top Gun is a film of its time and unrepeatable.
Although Top Gun's video clip aesthetic was harshly criticized in 1986, it did not mean that it was a brilliant box office success by the public, who understood better what the thing was about. If anyone spoke well of her, it was because of the film's impressive aerial acrobatics.
Thus, Roger Ebert could say that “the easiest way to sum it up was to say that the aerial scenes were brilliant and the ground scenes grimly predictable… The film knew exactly what to do with the special effects, but had no idea how they act, talk or think two people in love”. Nor that the film was intended to be anything other than a youthful fantasy.
The action scenes still retain an impression of reality that is hard to forget, thanks in part to the stunt pilot Art School, who died during filming trying to film images from the cockpit of his plane that would convey the sensation of spinning in the air. That's how real movies were back then. But three decades later, and having seen dozens of starfighter battles in Star Wars, what remains most alive in Top Gun are those grounded moments. Not because of the characters or the story, which is just as Ebert said, but because of its atmosphere.
Directed by Tony Scott, Bruckheimer's favorite director until he found Michael Bay, in Top Gun the movements were accelerated (those F-14s flying at full speed, the montage jerky), the images were full of sensuality (Cruise and McGillis getting involved with backlight wrapped in the music of Berlin and in a romantic blue identical to that of Michael Mann) and style was everything (the pilot's look, the aviator glasses, the leather jacket).
It looked like something totally new. So much so that among young Americans applications to enter military aviation multiplied: they had not understood that what the film sold had nothing to do with reality.
Top Gun: Maverick is about to be released and there are many references to the original film, so one of the main characters such as Val Kilmer's Iceman could not be missing. Now we know how they convinced the actor of the epic return.
In a recent interview, Tom Cruise has revealed why they have included Val Kilmer in the sequel:
"In the first one, I really worked really hard to get him in the movie, because he's a tremendous actor, and I wanted him to play that character. You see that Top Gun: Maverick scene and it's very special. It is very special. He's beautiful".
"It was the story Tom wanted to tell. Val Kilmer felt comfortable doing it. It was a very emotional shoot. We knew Val early on when he was a very young actor. And to see him even today and to see that he is still working on acting and that he has this great spirit, so helpful and just excellent filming. Obviously he's engaged, but he's still an amazing actor, an amazing individual and we're really excited to bring him back in this way. Tom was so nice. Tom actually said: I'm not going to do this movie unless Val is in it. So that was nice of Tom."
Top Gun: Maverick by Joseph Kosinski will be set 35 years after the original. Pilot Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is the new instructor at the Top Gun academy, where the best come. There he will meet Bradley Bradshaw (Milles Teller), the son of Goose, his friend who died during a training exercise. So he must face his past and show that he is still the best.
The cast includes Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Val Kilmer, Jennifer Connelly, Glen Powell, Jon Hamm, Ed Harris, Monica Barbaro, Charles Parnell, Jay Ellis, Bashir Salahuddin, Danny Ramirez, Lewis Pullman, Kara Wang, Shaheed Woods and Manny. Hyacinth.
The saying “sequels were never good” has long since ceased to be valid in the cinema, but if it were decided to update, at least, the phrase “except if Tom Cruise does them” should be included. The actor has become strong in the franchises and in 'Top Gun: Maverick' he uses the same principle that he applies in the 'Mission Impossible' saga: more intense, more spectacular, even more difficult. And he gets it. At a time when cinema is hanging by a thread.
One of the prevailing themes of 'Top Gun: Maverick' is the confrontation of technology against the human being, a classic that has been coloring the returns of old action movie stars from 'The Jungle 4' to 'The Expendables' , the confrontation of analog heroes in the digital age, and in the new sequel it turns into something more twilight, accepting a certain fateful fate of the old school, but taking flight for one last dance.
At one point in the first section, the character of Ed Harris warns Pete Mitchell that drones will end up taking the role of human pilots at some point and Cruise replies that that time has not come, almost like a look at the viewer, in a moment in which the cinema as we knew it lives on the precipice, reassuring those who still love to live emotions in front of a big screen in a dark room, saying that after a period of two years of uncertainty, the last guarantee of old-fashioned cinema is back, at least as long as he lives.
And how. Accustomed to films composed on hard drives and software, with 'Doctor Strange in the multiverse of madness' certifying a box office success for superheroes, color rays and CGI designs almost like those of an animated film, 'Top Gun: Maverick' It is a revulsion of immersive cinematographic virtuosity, a combination of traditional technology and modern visual resources that seek absolute aerial recreation. Get on a plane again.
Tony Scott already did it impeccably in his undeniable modern classic 'Top Gun' (1986), a film that managed to be the greatest expression of the tacky 80s and the commodified American flavor of the Reagan era and at the same time apply a modernity in its image that makes it absolutely timeless and perfectly valid today. This detail is not alien to Cruise producer and director Joseph Kosinski, who recreate the credits scene of the first with the same textures in a way that revalidates the visionary power of Scott, to whom the film is dedicated at the end.
As if starting with Kenny Loggins' Danger Zone wasn't enough, the color scheme and photography blend amazingly until we're introduced to Maverick in an equally timeless hangar, transitioning into a 'Picked for Glory' sequence. , with the intention of connecting the dots between the two stories and achieving a 'Top Gun' universe in which everything is epic and brilliant, where the fumes from the engines blur the image and the smell of fuel comes off the screen. In the marina it seems that the years do not pass, and for two hours we attend what is the perfect complement to the previous film.
Because although 'Top Gun: Maverick' fits perfectly into the definition of "recall" that now serves us to call undercover reboots with the original cast acting as facilitators of a new generation - something that applies here 100% - this is more of a continuation pure, whose protagonist is the same and the one at the controls, but also continues the theme of the duel for Goose and explores its consequences when we have the son of that one turned into a pilot with several accumulated resentments towards Mitchell.
The sequel, 36 years later, to the iconic eighties film that catapulted Tom Cruise to fame should be the next box office king after 'Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness'. If it succeeds, although it is not difficult to guess, we will know from May 26, the day of its premiere. However, as much as they explain it to us, we still do not understand why Meg Ryan and Kelly McGillis do not appear in the tape again. The Ryan thing is more understandable, although she could appear as the widow. However, the absence of the protagonist's original love interest has led many to think, including McGillis herself, that she is simply why she "is old".
We have to admit that Tom Cruise does not look his 59 years but that the replacement for McGillis, Jennifer Connelly, is 13 years younger than her has reopened wounds in Hollywood. Are we not prepared to see Tom Cruise still in love with a woman 64 years old, who looks 64 years old?.
Jennifer Connelly, who can also boast of that eternal youth that is increasingly common in high Hollywood, is not only the new love of Tom Cruise's character but, according to her interview with Variety, none has cut herself to her age of making a love/sex scene. Variety asked him directly about this scene, specifying how surprising it is for a Tom Cruise in his recent and mature career, and this was answered by Connelly.
Of course, it is a novelty that the main and central couple of a blockbuster has two fifty-year-olds as protagonists, also that at that age two stars participate in a sex scene. This, of course, would be more novel if either of them did not seem to have stopped their vital clock at 35.
