No-one expected much from the Top Gun sequel – and so its soaring global success came as a complete surprise. It was an emotional experience and a true one-off, says Nicholas Barber.
No disrespect to any of them, but it's clear that cinema's biggest global hits are now science fiction and fantasy blockbusters, featuring superhuman characters and lots of flashy digital imagery. But not in 2022. This year's international box-office champion was Top Gun: Maverick, a Tom Cruise vehicle that featured real people in real planes – and has so far raked in almost £1.25 billion ($1.5 billion) worldwide. That's around £400 million more than the runner up, Jurassic World: Dominion.
To make matters even less promising, Top Gun: Maverick was postponed and postponed again. Shooting took place between 2018 and 2019, and a July 2019 release was scheduled. But additional shooting and the Covid-19 pandemic kept pushing that date back until the new Top Gun was in danger of seeming almost as dated as the 1986 one. Cruise's co-star Miles Teller, for instance, was no longer the hot property in 2022 that he had been when he auditioned years earlier.
Expectations weren't exactly sky high, then, when Top Gun: Maverick eventually opened in May 2022 – but that may have worked in its favour. Viewers were hoping for a nostalgic guilty pleasure. What they got was one of the best Hollywood movies in years – a film that earnt a Rotten Tomatoes score of 96% from critics, and 99% from audiences.
As written by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Cruise's regular Mission: Impossible collaborator, Christopher McQuarrie, Top Gun: Maverick accomplishes an almost impossible mission itself. It continues a story that began in 1986, but it delivers as a stand-alone story, too. It keeps the structure and setting of the original by having a group of cocky pilots training (and playing beach games) at a US Navy jet-fighter school, but it improves on the original in every respect. The plotting, the acting, the dialogue, the head-spinning aerial sequences – all of them are polished until they gleam. And, of course, the film's exemplary skill and efficiency are embodied by its leading man, back in the cockpit as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, doing more of his own stunts than ever, and looking better than he did in 1986.
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