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.



The emotional core of the film lives in one room, and it belongs to Val Kilmer. Maverick visits Tom "Iceman" Kazansky, and Kilmer—who lost his voice to throat cancer in 2014—communicates mostly through a computer screen. Folding Kilmer's real-life illness into the movie is such a vulnerable choice that it changes the air around the scene. His shoulders sag. His breathing is work. But his eyes still have that cutting amusement from thirty-six years ago. He types, "It's time to let go," and Cruise's face, usually so tightly controlled, flickers into something childlike and frightened. For a second the indestructible icon disappears, and the whole movie opens into grief.



Whether you care about military iconography is almost irrelevant. *Top Gun: Maverick* works because it refuses to smirk at its own ridiculousness. The last act is a brutal canyon run dressed up as popcorn entertainment, but the more surprising victory is emotional. Maverick doesn't just prove he can still do it. He learns, reluctantly, to let someone else into the cockpit with him. I don't know if that means Cruise is actually changing, or if this is just one beautifully calibrated pause before he resumes doing the impossible alone. Sitting there with the engines rattling my chest, I realized I didn't need the answer. The movie makes room, briefly and honestly, for the idea that legends age too—and that believing in them can still feel good.