Review: 'Top Gun: Maverick' benefits from the technological, and screenwriting, improvements since the '80s

I remember the first time I saw Tom Cruise in “Top Gun” — because it was less than two weeks ago.

I can’t explain why I never saw the Tony Scott-directed 1986 action movie when it came out — except that I was a senior in college, and probably too cool and elitist for that kind of popcorn entertainment. Or maybe I was worried about finals. That part I don’t remember so clearly.

What I saw in the original “Top Gun,” when I finally saw it, was a movie that was outstanding when Cruise was airborne, and ridiculous when he was on the ground. I don’t blame Cruise for that, since he was 23 and still getting his footing as a movie star. The blame here goes to Scott, a director who always more about the whoosh of the machinery than the emotions of his human characters. It made me think back in agreement with Pauline Kael’s famously devastating summation of the movie that it was “a recruiting poster that isn’t concerned with recruiting but with being a poster.”

“Top Gun: Maverick,” though director Joseph Kosinski (who made “Tron: Legacy,” speaking of decades-delayed revisits of classic ‘80s movies) tries to evoke the original, is truly its own beast — and a nimble, energetic one at that.

When we catch up with Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, he’s fixing up an ancient propeller-powered fighter plane — a relic, like himself, as someone later comments — when he hops on his motorcycle and heads to work. He’s now a test pilot for an experimental stealth fighter jet, trying to hit Mach 10 before a rear admiral (Ed Harris) shuts down the project.

Then Maverick gets his new orders: To return to Top Gun, the Navy’s fighter pilot training program, to work with the best of the best. Maverick’s orders are to train a group of pilots for a dangerous mission — destroying a uranium processing plant being built by an unnamed enemy country — in less than a month.

Adm. Beau “Cyclone” Simpson (Jon Hamm) doesn’t see the need for Maverick’s mentoring, but Simpson is being overruled by the base’s commander: Adam. Tom Kazansky, better known as “Iceman” (Val Kilmer), Maverick’s rival and eventual wingman from the original. Iceman’s presence here suggests Quentin Tarantino’s famous monologue (in the 1994 indie “Sleep With Me”), theorizing that Maverick’s true love interest in the first movie wasn’t Kelly McGillis’ Charlie but Iceman, might have been on point.

Maverick has other relationship issues to deal with on the ground here. There’s a reunion with Penny (Jennifer Connelly), who owns the bar near the base, and who has a history with Maverick. But more pressing is the fact that one of the pilots he must train, Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), is the son of Maverick’s best friend, Tom Bradshaw, aka “Goose” — who died during a training mission in the backseat when Maverick was the pilot.

Rooster (nobody is referenced in this movie by their names, just their call signs) has his own rivalry — his Iceman, as it were — in another top pilot, the supremely confident Lt. Jake “Hangman” Seresin (Glen Powell). If Maverick is going to turn these hotshots into a cohesive team, he’ll have to deal with that competition as well as the ghosts of his past.

Kosinski takes inspiration from the dogfights of the 1986 movie, but updates them to state-of-the-art movie technology. Many of the shots make the audience feel like they’re in the cockpit with Maverick through every spin, dive and rise of the mission. (The best way to describe the actual mission is to quote another talented movie pilot: It’s “just like Beggar’s Canyon back home.”) Many of the flight scenes were filmed with IMAX cameras, so watching the movie on the biggest possible screen makes sense.

But if the filmmaking technology has advanced, the screenwriting craft has also kept pace. The tag-teamed script — where, I’m guessing, Cruise’s go-to screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie had a big influence — deepens Maverick’s emotional stakes, and those of the other pilots, in ways the first movie never could. It’s not Shakespeare by any stretch, but it shows the expectations for solid character development for even a big-budget popcorn movie have been raised in the last four decades.

First, last and always, though, “Top Gun: Maverick” gives us Tom Cruise doing what he does best: Applying his charm, his acting chops, and that indefinable movie-star thing to make big movies feel even bigger. When it comes to pleasing an audience, once again, Cruise makes sure it’s mission accomplished.

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‘Top Gun: Maverick’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 27, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action, and some strong language. Running time: 131 minutes.