36 years after the first film, Top Gun: Maverick has arrived! Tom Cruise returns to the character of Maverick, who is ordered back to Top Gun to train pilots who have already graduated from the school, for a mission that is almost impossible. I will get this out of the way early, Top Gun: Maverick is fantastic!
Tom Cruise leads this film with a pretty big number of supporting cast members, but this is definitively Cruise’s movie. Other notable cast members are Jon Hamm, Miles Teller, Glen Powell, and Jennifer Connelly as his love interest. Every cast member is great in this movie, and the number of students for Cruise to teach is high, so each one doesn’t get the most development on screen, but what makes me care about each one of them is Maverick.
For instance, Miles Teller is really good in the film, but I don’t love him as much as I expected to by the end of the second act, but if something were to happen to him, Maverick cares massively. That goes for the entire class of students as well. Maverick cares most about bringing these kids home after the mission, so if something goes wrong, we care because Maverick cares, and it works very well.
While all the performances are great, the story for this film, accompanied by the intense action, is what makes it fantastic. It’s almost too simple of a story, but the execution is ripe for the audience to be invested. Bring the best pilots in the country back to school, for a mission so difficult, no one has experienced anything similar. The training sequences are fun and intense all at the same time. Real problems arise when trying to train for an impossible mission, and when the mission finally becomes reality, that intensity grows ten-fold.
The action, especially in the third act, is simply phenomenal. Director Joseph Kosinski puts on a clinic for how to shoot fighter jets doing the most extreme maneuvers but allowing the audience to follow everything perfectly. Whether it’s putting the camera in the cockpit of an actual flying jet, or watching from a distance, you feel like a part of the action every second of the way. Tom Cruise put the rest of the cast through flight school for this movie, and that was a worthy investment after seeing how believable each of them are in the air.
Overall, Top Gun: Maverick is easily one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. If you have an IMAX near you, go that direction because about 75% of the film is shot in the IMAX format. The action is there, the sound design puts you in the cockpit, and the emotion of the story brings you to the edge of your seat through the intensity. I don’t see many people leaving the theater dissatisfied. I cannot wait to see this film again and neither should you! See it ASAP!
'Top Gun: Maverick' is in theaters on May 27th, 2022.
Rating: 4.8 out of 5
Logan Wischmeier (Contributing Editor) is a Texas native and a massive fan of all genres of film. You can find him talking about movies on YouTube or in line for the latest Star Wars/Comic Book film.Click Here to check out Logan's Articles.