Top Gun: Maverick
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
Running time: 2hrs11 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Tom Cruise stars in Top Gun: Maverick
One of cinema’s major draws is that it offers us fantasy, and I don’t mean in the elves, wizards and hobbits genre sense (although it does do that quite well too sometimes). Cinema offers us dreams. The chance to be tantalised by dreams, be immersed in the sensation of what might feel like if what was on the screen was actually true. It’s almost like masturbation for the brain, but not necessarily in a sexual sense.
Top Gun: Maverick, the decades-on sequel to the first film, is a premium fantasy film. It almost doesn’t matter that it’s about aeroplanes. Note that I said “almost”, and park that one, we’ll come back to it later. The fantasy that Top Gun: Maverick serves is perhaps the most seductive of them all: don’t think, just do it. Human beings are half-brain, half-instinct, and boy is it nice to escape from the thinking half sometimes. The thinking half can be such a drag. Reminding us that the world is complicated, that we have responsibilities, that we’re complicit, that we’re exploited, that we’re doomed, yadda, yadda, yadda, until the appeal of spending two hours immersed in “don’t think, just do it” becomes nigh-on impossible to resist. Don’t think about the geopolitical stance of this film, just do it.
Top Gun: Maverick is set in a world where if you want something enough, it will happen. If you want to fly that plane at mach 10, you just have to be enough of a badass. Physics doesn’t come into it. The world is pliable, susceptible to your wishes. Through sheer force of will, you can mould reality to your will. Tom Cruise is the perfect face for this film. He feels the need, the need for speed, and that’s what you’re gonna get.
Now, about that “almost” hanging out up there in the second paragraph… It almost doesn’t matter that it’s about aeroplanes. That little word is bearing quite a heavy load, because boy, do these aeroplanes deliver. These are the best action scenes I’ve seen in a cinema in quite some time. You can feel the force of the fantasy. If this person up there on the big screen wants this enough, it will happen. You can feel yourself willing the universe to work that way.
TOP GUN: MAVERICK (2022) Written by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, Christopher McQuarrie | Shot by Claudio Miranda | Edited by Eddie Hamilton
Playing out of Competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival
