'Top Gun: Maverick' is haunted by the image of its own star and of an America that may not exist anymore. BilgeEbiri writes
Illustration: Leonardo Santamaria 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.
This time, however, the sequence fades to black with one last longing look at the ship, as if it were a lost Edenic dream. It reads as a eulogy for Maverick and, by extension, Cruise himself. As the screen slowly goes dark, you can feel in your bones the 35-plus years that have elapsed since that first film.
By that point, it may well have been a matter of survival. After years as Hollywood’s most bankable movie star, Cruise had come close to flaming out completely, partly thanks to concerns over his heavy-duty involvement in Scientology, not to mention a series of bizarre television appearances . His films were regularly underperforming. Female viewers, once a reliable demographic, turned on him. Even his longtime studio, Paramount, dropped him, citing his less-than-stellar public image .
Cruise’s best performances were always extensions of his driven, all-American go-getter persona — the persona the original Top Gun helped create. This new Maverick has his daredevil temptations, to be sure, and when he’s flying — seen in close-up in the cockpit, his face yanked back by g-forces and his laser-focused eyes seemingly staring straight at us — he is brilliant and aggressive. On the ground, however, he displays a strange hesitancy, a fearfulness hiding behind that ever-present smile.
As Maverick becomes more and more invested in Rooster’s and the other aviators’ survival, his own fate feels like it’s in question. Late in the film, right before the final mission, when he shows up to see Penny , a bar owner and admiral’s daughter with whom he has rekindled an old romance, he’s wearing his crisp Navy whites and looks like an apparition.
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