Top Gun: Maverick

Ghosts in the Cockpit

Tom Cruise no longer enters scenes like a normal actor. He materializes inside them. About twenty minutes into Top Gun: Maverick, his battered test pilot stumbles into an almost comically ordinary American diner, and he looks less like a man stopping for coffee than a relic who somehow crossed over from another timeline. The people around him stare because he does not quite belong among them. I stared too. That is not just Pete "Maverick" Mitchell on screen. It is the last true movie star standing in an industry that has mostly forgotten what to do with movie stars.



Joseph Kosinski had a nearly ridiculous assignment here. How do you follow a 1986 Tony Scott movie that basically ran on vapor, testosterone, and pure attitude without collapsing into self-parody? His answer is melancholy. He gives the sequel real weight. Yes, the aerial work is practical and impressive, but what makes the film breathe is the heaviness in the quiet scenes. Tomris Laffly, writing for RogerEbert.com, was right to say the movie "strikes a fine balance between good-humored vanity and half-serious self-deprecation." Maverick isn't only battling anonymous foreign threats. He is wrestling with the knowledge that his whole mode of being may have outlived its era. Cruise, who seems to be fighting the same war against the age of weightless CGI spectacle, understands that instinctively.