Director Joseph Kosinski
Starring Tom Cruise Jennifer Connelly, Miles Teller
Rated M
Score 6/6

After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, Pete Mitchell is where he belongs, pushing the envelope as a courageous test pilot and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him.

“Nostalgia movies” are a trend that are not going to go away any time soon. The thing is a “Nostalgia movies” are the easiest type of movie for a filmmaker to fuck up. A great example of a “Nostalgia Movie” that is a fuck up would have to be the 2015 movie directed by Jon M. Chu Jem and the Holograms. For a “Nostalgia movie” to be a good movie it needs to straddle the line between paying respect to the source material and attracting a new audience. Usually, it seems that filmmakers are only interested in attracting the new audience and don’t care about the fans that got them to the director’s chair. I believe that in the last ten years that of the “Nostalgia movies” that have been released there has only been two movies that straddled the line, and they are Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Top Gun: Maverick. Now, there is a lot to love about this movie but the one thing you need to remember if you go see this at the cinema, be sure to see this on the biggest screen that your ‘friendly neighbourhood cinema’ has. What struck me about Maverick was how much beginning to end that it reminded me of the original movie starting with aircraft taking off from an aircraft carrier to the ending with the use of video credits before fading to black to roll the credits.
Perhaps with the exception of the 2017 The Mummy Tom Cruise gives a great performance and it should be noted that Cruise and Val Kilmer are the only actors to reprise their roles from the original movie though Meg Ryan and Anthony Edwards appear in archive footage. It was great to the character of Penny Benjamin is more then name mentioned in passing and was portrayed by Jennifer Connelly. Miles Teller was an interesting casting choice as “Rooster” Bradshaw the son of “Goose”. It is interesting to see the direction that Teller’s career has taken over the past nine years and that as an actor he more then just a romantic lead. I loved the introduction of “Rooster” and the effect it seemed to have on “Maverick”. Monica Barbaro gave a great performance as “Phoenix”. I’m not overly familiar with Barbaro’s work looking at her filmography it will be interesting to see how many times I come across her work in the future. Glen Powell seemed to have a Scott Eastwood quality while Lewis Pullman’s performance as ‘Bob’ Floyd had a charming everyman quality. Now what was really stunning about this movie was the aerial photography no green screen or CGI aerial shots were used just like it was with the original movie, I loved the final act of the movie. Even though there have been some developments with the release of movies the reason to watch Top Gun: Maverick at the cinema is the soundtrack it penetrates your very soul in a way that the speakers of an ordinary television is currently unable to.