top gun: maverick, part 2, or the fastest man alive
in which tom goes back to the movies
August 2020. London. The world is exiting a tentative, strange summer. The second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is rumbling on the horizon. Tom Cruise has gone to see Tenet.
See, there was a reason I kept banging on about Tenet last time.
This video is both a fascinating historical document and a masterpiece of surrealist marketing. It is a rich, rich text, and like any rich text, I will leave it to you to interpret as you like.
(The caption on social media for the video was “Big Movie. Big Screen. Loved It”, a quote I still regularly use.)
The video begs a question. Actually, it begs many questions. Chief among them, though, is “why did he do this?”
We can’t see into Tom Cruise’s mind. Frankly, that’s a good thing. His motivations here, though, seem reasonably clear. Whether he truly did love Tenet or not is irrelevant (I personally subscribe to the theory that Cruise watches every single film in release as a passionless, monklike exercise in devotion to cinema). It could have been anything on that screen. It could have been the Spanish dub of London Has Fallen that I saw at the cinema on a school exchange trip. What mattered is that it was a movie at the cinema.
Cruise had no personal stake in the fortunes of Warner Bros., or of Christopher Nolan, here, but his intention was clear enough. By going back to the movies, he was sending out a message: he was not leaving the big screen behind. For him, the theatrical experience was it.
Welcome back to Top Gun: Maverick, and to our final newsletter of the Tom Cruise series. Safe flying!
Though I mentioned the Apple and Netflix bids for Maverick as a kind of stilted cliffhanger last week, they were never realistic prospects. In fact, we only found out about them in retrospect, in reporting that made clear that the offers had since been rejected by a studio - and a star - determined to keep the film on the big screen.
It was a risky bet, one which meant keeping Maverick until the summer of 2022, but it’s hard not to see the following year as an extended vindication of that strategy.
Various things happened here, in the way of that vindication. For one, the stream-only or day and date theatrical/streaming movies of 2021 had a pretty rough go of it. Warner Bros.’ much-promoted HBO Max strategy was mostly a bust. With the exception of Godzilla vs. Kong and Dune, which benefited from lowered expectations to register as hits, the studio’s entire 2021 line-up bellyflopped, and it was hard not to point to the joint availability on streaming as a good explanation. The Disney+ Premier Access efforts - Black Widow, Cruella, Jungle Cruise et al - were similarly a big shrug.
Then, as studios began to experiment more with theatrical-only releases, the hits started coming. Shang-Chi, No Time To Die and Venom: Let There Be Carnage were successful preludes to the monster hit of 2021 that really broke the seal on theatrical exclusivity in a pandemic world - Spider-Man: No Way Home. If there was a singular movie that did “save cinema” during COVID, really, it was this. Even as the Omicron variant sent COVID back to the top of the headlines, No Way Home made bank that would have been impressive pre-2020. For a brief, fevered moment, it seemed possible that it might even sneak into the Best Picture campaign as a back-pat from Hollywood for its box office achievements.
It didn’t make it, of course. That’s for the big leagues. That’s for Tom Cruise.
As 2022 rolled around, it seemed a sensible decision to release your big tentpole movie in cinemas, so that was a tick in the column. The question remained, though, as to whether anyone would actually go to see Maverick on all those big screens. We covered the case against last week - that it could be seen a creatively bankrupt nostalgia play, pulling a poorly aged cable-channel staple out of the only context it worked. It was quite reasonable to be sceptical of both its appeal and its quality.
But, like Waystar Royco CEO Tom Wambsgans, Maverick put the work in to prove the doubters wrong. It scheduled its public premiere for CinemaCon in April, a month ahead of its release, and a big red-carpet showing at Cannes. Sure, both of those strategies have been somewhat embarrassed this year by The Flash and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny respectively, but it wasn’t unreasonable to interpret them as signs of confidence. They wanted people to see this thing. Not regular people, even. Not regular schmoes. No, they wanted tastemakers. Critics. Smart people. The French.
For the jingoistic military propaganda movie? That sounds like an odd strategy.
Oh, right.
I see what you’re getting at now.
The gospel spread on the way to the Memorial Day release date. Top Gun: Maverick was good. Not hesitant three star good. Not “good for the kind of movie it is”. No. Good good. Not even action movie good good - the words being thrown around were “emotional” and “impactful”, adjectives which seem somewhat alien to Top Gun, which was ultimately a music video with extra steps. The sense is that something had happened here, that everything had gone right.
It helped that the skies (ha) had cleared for Maverick. The summer of 2022 was an odd duck - Hollywood had been back in production for over a year by this point, but all parts of the pipeline had slowed down, from filming to editing to visual effects. The logjam between delayed pre-pandemic projects like Maverick and pandemic-filmed meant that, while the world was ready to experience its first mostly normal summer in three years, movies weren’t quite there yet.
There were the requisite two Marvel blockbusters, a Jurassic World and a Pixar, but the summer was sparser than a typical schedule, filled with dead spots for cheap horror movies that stopped existing after a week (my apologies to fans of Beast and The Invitation). The calendar was uninspiring enough, but then came the stinky smell of garbage shit: Thor: Love and Thunder, Jurassic World Dominion, or simple mediocrity like Doctor Strange and Lightyear. A ladder down the rung, and mid-budget films like Nope and Elvis offered some fun, but this was not an exciting showing from the toy store.
Perfect flying conditions, then. Maverick hit at the end of last May, and instantly made more money than anyone expected. Then, it kept going, holding on beyond what anyone expected of a summer blockbuster. It ran the table from start to finish in summer. It topped the box office in the first weekend of September. Nothing else - not Marvel, not the dinosaurs - came close. Maverick would only be lapped by Avatar: The Way of Water at the very end of the year, and even then, it kept the lead in US grosses. Audiences, from red to blue states and back again, went nuts for it. A+ CinemaScore, 99% on Rotten Tomatoes, the works. It was Cruise’s biggest ever hit by almost double. This shit went crazy.
It went so crazy, in fact, that the momentum just kept going, even once it finally ducked out of cinemas in the autumn. Maverick had worked up enough goodwill to become a presumptive Best Picture contender, and it never really lost that status through Oscar season. Its final haul on nominations day was six, including Picture and Adapted Screenplay (oh, we’re putting a pin in that). It was a marker of how successful Maverick had become that six nominations felt light - that Cruise, an Academy apostate, was probably a few breaths away from sniping Paul Mescal to take a Best Actor spot.
In the event, Cruise ducked out of the Oscars ceremony, where Maverick nabbed just the one win for Sound. It didn’t matter much. As a Best Picture nominee in his role as executive producer, Cruise was practically carried on everyone’s shoulders during the necessary luncheon things during Oscars season. This was the most accepted he had been inside the Hollywood establishment in well over a decade. He had made it. It was a long road back from Oprah’s sofa to Spielberg’s hug, but goddamn it, he made it.
Last week, I described legacy sequels with some distaste. I still hold that view. It’d be weird if I changed it. I made some exceptions to the rule, because it’s been proven a few times that, in the right hands, legacy sequels can work. Even if the idea of them is inherently evil.
A much easier rule of thumb to apply, one which does encompass even the good ‘uns, is that legacy sequels are almost never superior to the originals. God love Doctor Sleep, but Flanagan isn’t Kubrick. Blade Runner 2049, I cherish you, but you walked in footsteps already trodden. Matrix Resurrections, your clever meta-commentary relies on the unbeatable appeal of the first one.
Even the best imitations are just that. Legacy sequels are defined by the achievements of what came before, and they’re bound almost never to escape those achievements. Lightning never strikes quite as impressively the second time.
Part of the scepticism surrounding Maverick pre-release was that, unlike those aforementioned lega-sequels, the classic film from which it follows is… not perfect. Even the most TOPGUNpilled Cruise stans out there, I think, would concede this. It’s remembered for a reason, but there is little exceptional about it, other than the way it perfectly captured the mid 80s zeitgeist.
Well. That which was viewed as a drawback, Top Gun: Maverick saw as opportunity. Rather than trying to slavishly impersonate the original, and therefore fall into its slipstream, it simply decides to be a better movie in every conceivable way.
God, this movie rules. It’s just really good.
Let’s take the pin out of that Adapted Screenplay nomination. It received a fair bit of flack at the time, mostly along the lines of “well, nobody liked it for its screenplay”. People pointed out the cheesy dialogue, the conventional structure, the stock characters. That’s not good writing, so the logic goes. That doesn’t deserve it.
Well, all of those people were losers for saying that. Amidst a writer’s strike, it feels apt to say that good writing does not come in one shape. It isn’t just when the dialogue is sharable on Twitter. Good writing is contextual. Good writing is when somebody figures out the best way to tell a particular kind of story, and tells it that way. Good writing is the elaborately witty dialogue and complex characters of Succession, or the self-aware campy delights of John Wick, or even the dorky, aching sincerity of Knock at the Cabin. Good writing is the 30,000 word time travel novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo in 2012.
Only one of those was a lie.
Good writing, yes, is Top Gun: Maverick, a movie and screenplay perfectly in tune with what it wants to be. At every turn, its approach is clean and simple and unobtrusively correct. The whole plot revolves around a complicated mission, so the second and third acts practice it over and over until we’re familiar with every potential challenge for the heroes to face when the real thing comes around. It understands intuitively that the suspense isn’t about whether the good guys will win, because of course they will, but how far they’ll have to go to get it. It seems almost facile to praise a movie for making its overall stakes so clear, but this is the kind of thing that trips up swathes of wannabe blockbusters. Maverick’s total clarity is an exception, not the rule.
Good writing, too, is when the small army of credited screenwriters realised there was legitimate emotion and pathos in this story that didn’t just have to be fodder for a montage set to the third rerun of “Every Breath You Take”. The Maverick/Rooster dynamic is shockingly effective, in part because it plays out exactly how you’d expect but for the actual source of the conflict - the “Goose’s son blames Maverick for his dad dying” was such easy fodder for drama that it feels legitimately surprising that we get to the conflict via a different, more emotionally complicated route. Just that one small step is enough for the drama to feel fresher than expected, and Cruise and Teller - who is, surprisingly, straight-up great in this! - do the rest of the legwork.
In facing the classic lega-sequel challenge of how far to lionise the original story and characters versus challenging them, Maverick also takes a shrewd mixture of the obvious and the unusual in its approach. At first glance, this is as conventional a legacy sequel story as you can get - the original character passing the torch to a younger successor and making amends for the past. The young pilots are familiar types, with Glen Powell and Miles Teller falling neatly into the Iceman-Maverick dynamic. The title character, for some time, walks around being told by everyone that he’s a dinosaur, out of time, unnecessary. It’s time for the new generation to move in.
When it comes down to it, though, Maverick zags away from that formula. The remix elements fall away as the movie goes on, the Iceman analogue sitting out the majority of the third act, while Miles Teller moves back from the main character of his story to a supporting fixture. In the empty space steps Tom Cruise, who isn’t bloody ready to pass the torch, thank you very much.
Yeah, Maverick isn’t about moving on from the past. It’s about how Tom Cruise can do in two minutes fifteen what pilots half his age struggle to do in three. All of that talk about how it’s time for Maverick/Cruise to move on and accept the present - it’s all there to be proven wrong. No, we are promised. No, Tom Cruise doesn’t have to stop flying planes at age sixty. He’s as good as he ever was, and the best the new generation can do is to fly by his side and support him. He’ll never retire. Age? Age is a joke. Tom can do this kind of stuff forever.
There’s a fine line, with these things. In certain hands, that approach would be egotistical and embarrassing, the cringeworthy last gasps of a has been who doesn’t know he’s a has been. Here, it’s… oddly likeable? Perhaps likeable is the wrong word. Effective, maybe. It’s certainly effective. Mainly because, in staking his big 36-years-later Maverick comeback on the idea that he’s as cool as he was in the mid 80s, Cruise walks the walk. The man puts effort into this thing.
So, obviously, there’s the planes. You can’t not talk about the planes. Rightly, much of the critical praise for Maverick surrounded its heavy use of practical filmmaking for the jet sequences, which entailed licensed pilot Cruise helping to train the young bucks how to fly actual fighter jets. Cruise is far from the only one performing stunts here, but the practical approach emanates from him. It’s the defining aspect of the late-career Cruise brand - that the crazy shit you’re watching is real crazy shit.
Here, the results pay off beautifully. You can throw a lot of words around like “weight” and “authenticity” to describe it, but at the end of the day, watching real people do real stuff on screen is just more exciting than watching CGI people do it. It feels right. That Cruise knows that, and plays into it, is the best explanation for this career comeback he’s had.
It’s not just the planes, though. Cruise’s post-Sofagate pivot to largely action movies has given rise to the fashionable criticism that he’s not a particularly good actor, and that he does the same thing in every movie (criticisms, you may notice, that neatly mirror the screenplay ones). I’d sound like an insane person saying that he’s actually doing some great dramatic work in both Rogue Nation and Fallout, but I think I sound slightly less so when talking about his work in Maverick.
It’s legitimately affecting! There’s real pathos in how he portrays Maverick as a drifter on the edges of a world that used to be his, walking into reminders of his own mistakes everywhere. His misty eye skills are top notch here. That’s to say nothing of his scene with Val Kilmer, a scene of genuine quiet beauty that finds a really lovely dignity in portraying Kilmer’s current condition, and suddenly unearths a deeply emotional core to what was, in the first movie, fodder for homoerotic subtext that the two actors understood completely differently.
Obviously, Paul Mescal deserved the nod. But would it have been so wrong to recognise Cruise for this movie? I propose no.
I began this series by talking about Reagan and US Air Force recruitment, so it feels right to circle back there. Obviously, Top Gun gained a significant reputation for acting as military propaganda. Obviously, that’s a thornier subject in the year of our lord 2022.
Maverick chooses to tackle that difficult legacy by sidestepping it entirely. There’s no doubt that this sequel, which was made with cooperation from the military in exchange for positive representation (the devil’s deal so many modern blockbusters have taken), is still locked into that function. It’s still a pro-military work. Hard to deny that. But it is undoubtedly less interested in that work.
In that respect, Maverick is a very modern movie, nestling itself in the comforting dead zone between glorification and critique that Hollywood loves so dearly. The near-parodic loving gaze of the original is replaced with a cooler, more objective aesthetic, where the jets and the airships and the fighter academies look sleekly effective rather than actively gorgeous.
Even in its subtext, the movie zones in more on the people than the background apparatus in which they love, quietly eliding politics without even signalling that’s what it’s doing. There isn’t a critical anti-military bone in Maverick’s body, but it’s unfussed about really thumping its chest on the positive case either. Benevolent centrism is its vibe, and in doing so, it gets to be for everyone in a way the original wasn’t. As a leftist with a healthy distaste for the American military, it wasn’t hard for me to hold my nose and enjoy the fun here.
If you’re looking for an explanation as to why Maverick blew up the way it did, I think there’s none better than the way they made the most obvious criticism of the first one seem like an afterthought this time.
How’s Tom these days?
Life’s a rollercoaster for our guy. The story of Maverick is a story of triumph, it’s true, and Dead Reckoning Part One is well-placed next month to pick up on that renewed career momentum. It’s never just one thing with Cruise, though.
Just this week, just in time for me to riff on it (thanks Tom!), it emerged that Cruise has been blowing up Hollywood execs’ phones over his frustration with how Oppenheimer is going to pinch all the IMAX screens from Dead Reckoning Part One just a week afterwards. It fits a neat subplot of the recent Cruise renaissance, in which a deep well of anger inside the man has been seen to erupt - most notably in the very memorable recording of him going berserk at somebody on the Dead Reckoning set for violating COVID protocols.
None of these things are right or wrong. You can justify both those actions. Morality becomes elastic and confusing in close proximity to Tom Cruise. I have had the recent pleasure of encountering Cruise stan Twitter, in which he is - in some way ironically, I have to assume, but also unironically in another way - held up as a gay and/or lesbian icon. Yeah, they’re out here babygirlifying Tom Cruise. Anything is possible in this crazy world of ours.
That’s the case on the other end of the scale, too.
At this year’s Golden Globes, host Jerrod Carmichael made a crack about Cruise and Shelly Miscavige, the missing wife of Scientology co-founder David (a personal friend of Cruise’s), a reminder of the deeply strange and somewhat disturbing backstory behind Cruise’s religion. Nobody was quite sure how to react.
Cruise is more popular now than he’s been for years, but his popularity runs proportionate to the questions we ask about him. That’s the case even now, when he has essentially retreated out of public life. In the absence of new controversies, his back catalogue provides more than enough fodder. That’ll be the case until the moment he drops dead on the set of his Mars movie in 2056.
Nearly 40 years on, the man still defies description. There’s not one way to feel about him. Nothing - and yes, stans of Twitter, up to and including his sexuality - is in a straight line. Frankly, nothing makes sense. He is a human question mark, an enigma wrapped inside a shorter than average man. I’ve written ten newsletters about him, and I don’t even have an answer to any of the questions surrounding him.
As with all things, it’s the mystery that keeps us watching. When the questions are answered, and the mystery is gone, the story ends.
We made it! Gosh. It’s been a while, huh? This series started in February. Turns out 36 years of Tom Cruise is difficult to summarise concisely, which ought to have been made clear by the 7000-odd words I have spent on Top Gun: Maverick alone.
As always, thank you to everyone who has read these for bearing with me. It’s hugely appreciated.
A note on that, actually. This past week has been a series of endings, from Succession to Barry to (um) Ted Lasso. I regret to inform you that Nostalgia Detective, a cultural object of completely equal stature to those things, is joining them.
But not this week! Don’t be silly. No. I wouldn’t spring that on you right away. We have a series still left in us. You’ll have time to pre-grieve. Don’t sweat it.
I think it’s better to end something while it’s still vaguely fresh rather than falling asleep at the wheel and ending it by accident. I’m also kind of tickled by the pomposity of calling next one “the final series”. Look at it. It sounds so weighty. The final series.
Speaking of said final series, we’ll be back for it at the end of this month. One last ride, with a franchise very near and dear to my heart.
Don’t smile because it’s over. Cry because it happened. See you then.
I'm really said to hear you're planning to end the newsletter. I've only discovered it recently, but I came to love how it translates legitimately deep analysis into stylish, accessible text.
Any chance you might extend it beyond one more series/season?