"You think up there you're dead, believe me!"
Maverick is told early on in this film "your kind is headed for extinction". The line refers to fact pilots being replaced with drones but it also works on a real-world level when referring to the big draw movie star, of which Tom Cruise is arguably the last. Maverick replies "maybe so sir, but not today" which feels apt because this belated sequel shows that the age of the movie star isn't quite over yet.
Maverick has been in the Navy for 30 years and is a distinguished pilot but has never climbed the ranks. At the request of Iceman (Val Kilmer), he is tasked with returning to Top Gun to train the Navy's best pilots for a nigh-on impossible mission. These pilots include Phoenix (Monica Barbaro), Hangman (Glen Powell) and Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick's deceased wingman Goose.
Often legacy sequels are little more than nostalgia or simply a repeat of the original film. There's certainly plenty of love for the first film with even the occasional shot being reused and many of the major characters returning to one extent or another. But actually this feels like a proper sequel which builds on what came before rather than simply re-lives it.
I really liked the way Maverick was written in this film. It would have easily had him as some useless drunk defined by PTSD but that wouldn't fit the character. He's still the cocky pilot we knew, albeit one who was damaged by the death of Goose. This felt to me like Tom Cruise's best performance in a while, still doing ridiculous things no other actor would attempt but actually delivering some proper emotion alongside it.
The film works as a standalone film too, you certainly don't need to have seen the original film to enjoy it. I thought the new characters were really great from the exasperated Vice Admiral Cyclone played by Jon Hamm to the new generation of pilots. We've seen how fantastic Miles Teller is previously but Monica Barbaro and Glen Powell are equally fantastic here, really making their character feel like real people (as well as coping with the absurd training for this film in the planes).
This is a film which really builds up to it's third act when the dangerous mission takes place. I thought it's really brilliantly written so that the training sequences serve to tell the viewer as well as the characters the risks and complexities of the mission. Inevitably things don't entirely go to plan and that's when the tension really mounts- the last part of this film is really thrilling.
I think this is perhaps the best legacy sequel we've seen in the way it has just the right amount of nostalgia and call-backs but still gives us an original story. It's also a story that isn't just set in the same world but is a proper sequel which deals with the fallout of the first film and moves the lead character on. The age of the movie star lives on with Tom Cruise.
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