I saw Top Gun: Maverick the weekend it came out. It has stuck with me, for two main reasons.
The first is that it is just an amazing movie. The 1986 original, directed by Tony Scott, is a quintessentially ’80s product, an enjoyable if cheesy watch, undergirded by a fundamentally pro-American, pro-military aesthetic. Its action and flying scenes are exciting; what happens in between, less so. The young Tom Cruise is well-cast as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a cocky naval aviator squaring off against Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, his rival for best pilot at TOPGUN, played by Val Kilmer. There’s a bit of pathos sprinkled throughout, mostly in Maverick’s friendship with, and mourning of, Nick “Goose” Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards), with whom he flies. But while it’s entertaining, and has justly earned pop-culture immortality, it’s really not that great of a movie. Some of the things it’s famous for are just testaments to its ridiculousness, such as, say, the volleyball scene.
Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski, however, seems to have decided to make an actually, unabashedly good movie. The most-thrilling aspects of the original remain, and are, if anything, upgraded. The flight choreography, both in training and in the climax, is clearly and thrillingly depicted. There was a thoroughgoing emphasis, throughout the production, on verisimilitude: The actors went through a kind of boot camp, and actual planes were used as much as possible, with CGI, the bane of the modern blockbuster, employed not as a substitute for spectacle but as a sparing complement to it.
Crucially, in between such sequences, Top Gun: Maverick is actually interesting. The seemingly ageless Tom Cruise leans into the passage of time in the sequel, constantly trying to defy his reputation as a “fossil,” holding on to those he cares about (Kilmer returns as Iceman, and the story touchingly accommodates Kilmer’s own physical decline). He also deals with past trauma, most obviously lingering guilt about his role in the death of Goose. This trauma is embodied in the person of Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, Goose’s son (Miles Teller, in an unexpectedly impressive and uncanny performance), whom Cruise is forced to train as part of the high-stakes mission that gathers the nation’s best pilots back to the eponymous flight academy. In terms of both spectacle and emotional heft, Top Gun: Maverick exceeds its predecessor in every way, while lovingly building on it.
An emblematic example is its equivalent of the original’s volleyball scene: What was a spontaneous and pointless interlude of masculine posturing becomes, in Top Gun: Maverick, a quite-deliberate team-building exercise. By respecting what came before but also building on it, Top Gun: Maverick deftly avoids two traps into which long-delayed sequels often fall: excessively reverent nostalgia bordering on repetition, and a kind of deconstruction that forces us to question our affection for the original. The result is a classic, straightforward, crowd-pleasing blockbuster. (Yes, sometimes it is just that simple: A movie can give you what you want out of it. So spare me these pointless, baseless theories, best restricted to places like Reddit, that Maverick is dead the whole time or nonsense of that nature. Just accept that something can be simple and enjoyable!)
The quality of Top Gun: Maverick is a living rebuke to those who argue that late-stage American culture is too decadent to produce anything of value. And that it maintains the pro-American, pro-military message of the original likewise rebuffs both the anti-patriotic currents of our day and those who think our culture is incapable of producing them.
This brings to mind the second reason Top Gun: Maverick has stuck with me since I first saw it: Its production and release provide one of the best pieces of news about the relationship between Hollywood and China that we have gotten in some time. Eric Schwartzel, who covers this beat for the Wall Street Journal (and a few months ago published Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, an excellent book on the topic), has the story:
The Chinese tech firm Tencent Holdings Ltd. in 2019 signed on to co-finance the film, which the Shenzhen-based conglomerate hoped would yield a windfall at the box office. Yet when “Top Gun: Maverick” hits theaters this weekend, it will do so without any financing from Tencent, and without any mention of the Chinese firm that had once boasted of its involvement in the film.
The reason: Tencent executives backed out of the $170 million Paramount Pictures production after they grew concerned that Communist Party officials in Beijing would be angry about the company’s affiliation with a movie celebrating the American military, according to people familiar with the matter.
Association with a pro-American story grew radioactive as relations between the U.S. and China devolved, the people added. The about-face turned “Top Gun: Maverick” from a movie that once symbolized deepening ties between China and Hollywood into a fresh example of the broader tensions forming between the U.S. and China.
Schwartzel adds that, in the movie’s original trailer in 2019, Maverick’s jacket, which has, among other things, a Taiwanese flag stitched onto it, was altered to remove said flag. This was done at the advice of Tencent, which thought this would increase the likelihood of the film’s getting a China release. But after the falling out with Tencent, the flag was restored.
Top Gun: Maverick is unlikely to get released in China. But good riddance. I agree with Kyle Smith: China’s breakup with Hollywood is long overdue. Besotted with the possibility of accessing the Chinese market and its massive customer base, Hollywood studios have for decades now not only leaned toward easily translatable facile spectacle but also willingly altered or outright censored their products to sate Chinese political or cultural standards in the hope of securing Chinese releases for them. We’ve already seen evidence that this relationship was fraying; last year’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, 2021’s biggest movie, never got an official Chinese release, either. (One of China’s demands was to edit the Statue of Liberty out of the film’s finale — an affrontery and a logistical impossibility, given its prominence in the movie’s finale.) And China is increasingly convinced that its domestic film industry — constructed with American help until the Chinese stole all of the necessary know-how in a familiar tale — is now capable of standing up on its own, and does not need American films to support it.
So, let the drifting apart continue. It is true that China can now make its own blockbusters; last year’s The Battle at Lake Changjin, a propaganda film about the Korean War from China’s perspective (in which Americans are portrayed as the villains), made nearly $1 billion in China alone. But China’s insular, aggressive nationalism does not entice global audiences. The confident, inspiring patriotism of Top Gun: Maverick, however, doesn’t merely appeal to Americans, who are flocking to the movie in record numbers. It also has great appeal worldwide.
If the movie’s artistic quality and domestic success rebuke those who think America finished at home, its international success ought to humble those who think the American way of doing things has lost its appeal abroad. May America, and Hollywood, heed these lessons.