Photo: BBC
Tom Cruise returns to the big screen in Top Gun: Maverick, gaining countless praises from critics, who describe the film as a “barrier-breaking sequel” to the first film released in 1986.
The sequel to the film, hailed as one of the greatest films of the 1980s, sees Cruise return to her character as US pilot Maverick.
It is “as thrilling as blockbusters get,” as demonstrated by Independent, applauding it as a “true legacy sequel.” At the time, The Telegraph described it as “absurdly exciting” and “unquestionably the best studio action film in years.”
In addition to Cruise, the cast actors include Jennifer Connolly, Jon Hamm, Monica Barbaro, Danny Ramirez, Val Kilmer and Ed Harris. Top Gun will be released in theaters this month.
Divergent Series’ Miles Teller plays Rooster, the son of Maverick’s former partner Goose. Currently a pilot himself, Rooster sees Maverick as the cause of his father’s death in the film’s first installment.
In addition, Maverick also visited Top Gun aviation school as an instructor who trains another age of pilots.
Top Gun: Maverick was originally scheduled to be released in 2019; however, it was postponed to allow the team to complete the flight scenes. And it was delayed again after the Covid pandemic.
Variety’s Peter Debruge has portrayed the “barrier-breaking sequel” as a “stunning follow-up,” adding, “Hardly anything in Top Gun: Maverick will surprise you, except how well it does nearly all the things audiences want and expect it to do.”
Debruge applauded the flight scenes for their precision.
“It’s the most immersive flight simulator audiences will have ever experienced,” he stated. “If the flying scenes here blow your mind, it’s because a great many of them are the real deal, putting audiences right there in the cockpit alongside a cast who learned to pilot for their parts.”
Robbie Collin of The Telegraph presented a five-star film review, saying the “play of light and gravity on actors’ faces, and the way the landscapes spin and drop away balletically through the canopy glass puts other blockbusters’ green-screened swooping to shame.”
“Watching Cruise’s return as Maverick is so outrageously pleasurable largely because the actor himself treats it as pleasure,” he stated.
Collin sees a “smooth and moving sun,” portraying the film as a “smooth and shockingly moving plot,” portraying the film as “Dad Cinema at its eye-crinkling apogee: all rugged wistfulness and rough-and-tumble comradeship, interspersed with flight sequences so preposterously exciting and involving they seem to invert the cinema through 180 degrees.”
Meanwhile, Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang’s review read: “A lot of consideration and calculation have clearly gone into this long-aborning blockbuster sequel, insofar as Cruise [one of the producers] and his collaborators have taken such clear pains to maintain continuity with the events, if not the style, of the first film”Top Gun: Maverick is a longer, costlier and appreciably weightier affair, and its expanded emotional scope and heightened production values give it a classy, elegiac sheen; it’s like a hot summer diversion in prestige-dinosaur drag or vice versa. As a rare big-budget Hollywood movie about men and women who fly without capes, it has a lot riding on it.”
