That's not clear from the start. First impressions are pretty bad, with a lot of aggressive nostalgia-baiting - the music, images and even title fonts are carefully calibrated to give dads the world over a dopamine hit, and an early scene at a bar that introduces this film's roundup of cadets, along with the obligatory love interest is pretty bad.
But.
In another early scene where the protagonist is test-driving a bonsai SR71, he goes against orders and does as maverick do not because he wants to wave his willy around - he's taking another hit to his career for the team; He's trying to make it so their project doesn't get canned, thus saving their jobs. That's kind of emblematic of how this picture is different from the 1986 model.
I mean, he does end up willy-waving in the end and causes the project to fail, but it's played for laughs.
So yeah, Tom Cruise's character, despite being the absolute best at what he does and always pulling off any supposedly impossible flying feat he puts his mind into, is kind of a fuckup; his career is on the rocks after far too many reckless stunts and some self-sabotage so as to not get saddled with a desk job. It's always perfectly clear he's going to end up earning everyone's admiration by dint of being so fucking awesome, but he makes enough mistakes that it's possible to root for him. Even better, and unlike on the first film, his motivations aren't selfishness and various insecurities. He at least tries to put other people's interests before his for pretty much the whole movie.
Even the obligatory love interest is more interesting. Beyond it being the great Jennifer Connelly, there's a sense of shared history now, it's not just some girl he gets an inappropriate boner for. Their big love scene is actually a conversation in bed.
Back to the plot: his old buddy Iceman gets him to prepare a bunch of young Top Gun graduates for a seemingly suicide mission against a fortified military installation in a carefully unspecified country against a very tight time limit.
This leads to a lot of drama, not just from the clashing personalities but because among the young whippersnappers is Rooster, son of Maverick's old buddy Dead Meat Goose.
The drama is nothing out of the ordinary, but it's a little bit cleverer and more nuanced that it needs to be (or than it would have been in the hands of Tony Scott). It's very enjoyable. The always welcome John Hamm is there as the authority figure who's always busting Maverick's balls, so that's another plus.
And the frequent flying scenes are, as advertised, incredible. Everyone's saying that this movie needs to be watched on the biggest screen possible... and yeah, I fully endorse that. It's consistently stunning, all the real hardware and stunts lending a tactility and a sense of weight that's very much appreciated in this age of blue/greenscreen. The sound design is incredible, too. It's unimpeachable as spectacle, expertly delivered, and frequently peppered throughout the movie, and it makes an already very likeable film essential viewing.
It all ends with a suicide mission into enemy territory that bears so many Star Wars similarities I was kind of expecting Lord Vader's tie fighter to pop up at some point to shoot at the good guys. It sports some of the most glorious vehicular action since Fury Road (this is not nearly as good as that, but that's absolutely not a knock on its quality). It also starts piling up the cheese in an entertaining fashion, along with script inconsistencies and ridiculous developments. Not that there wasn't any of that going on before, but it really goes into overdrive in the third act.
And that's ok! It's all earned. This is not a movie that even pretends to try for realism - it operates on a kind of heightened, operatic reality that makes all that easy to forgive. I mean, it's a new Top Gun movie.
But this time, it's good.
So do we need to get Friedman and Seltzer to make a shitty parody now? You know, for symmetry?
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