Cruise's Last Stand

Thirty-six years after the original, Top Gun: Maverick eulogizes the actor’s entire career.

- BILGE EBIRI

TOP GUN: MAVERICK is in theaters May 24.

I'd never noticed the curiously melancholy overtones of Harold Faltermeyer’s famous Top Gun theme until the opening moments of the brand-new Top Gun: Maverick. Maybe it was the distance in time. Back in 1986, those gongs and synth chords felt like a fairly standard New Wave–y intro; today, they register as a mournful dirge. Even the ensuing guitar riffs, which once seemed so triumphantly badass, now have a sad echo to them. ¶ What’s even weirder: Maverick appears to recognize this. The sequel, directed by Joseph Kosinski, begins pretty much exactly as the first picture did, with a modified version of Faltermeyer’s theme playing against onscreen text introducing us to the elite training program for the Navy’s best pilots. That theme is then replaced (as it was in the earlier film) by Kenny Loggins’s power-pop classic “Danger Zone” as we cut to a montage of fighter jets launching off and landing on an aircraft carrier.

In the original Top Gun, directed by Tony Scott, this montage served a narrative purpose: It set up a scene involving Tom Cruise’s young fighter pilot, Maverick, flipping off an enemy mig in the skies over the Indian Ocean. It’s a moment that encapsulates the whole movie. Yes, the Cold War was raging and some were upset about the film’s militarism, but Top Gun was really about the need for speed and being the best of the best, beach volleyball and Goose and “Take My Breath Away.” Most of all, it was about Cruise and the unforeseen astronomical event that was his smile.