Top Gun Maverick Review: Tom Cruise Raises The Bar For Movie Sequels

‘Top Gun: Maverick’ is a near-perfect movie. With Tom Cruise as the producer, the film spares no expense on making this film as authentic as possible. This is a film that was delayed for years in order to perfect the high octane stunts and visuals and the extra mile in effort pays off.

Photo by Scott Garfield/Scott Garfield – © 2022 Paramount Pictures Corporation. All rights reserved.

Real aircraft, real actors, and real stunts that are so impressive, you might think that you are watching a Mission Impossible movie.

The movie is a spectacle for fans of the action genre as it lives and breathes on creating near death tension. The flight sequences are immersive and technology is detailed from the type of planes used, how they stack up against modern machinery, and the film even plays out smart geopolitical wargames between nations.

The cast is spectacular from top to bottom. Despite pushing 60, Cruise is still Maverick. Cruise played his role to perfection with unrivaled respect for the character and the source material. The younger cast plays their roles well given the limited screen time they have with Glen Powell being the standout with a next-level arrogant level of charisma.

Photo by Scott Garfield/Scott Garfield – © 2022 Paramount Pictures Corporation. All rights reserved.

The only negative of this film is that some of the characters are not as fleshed out as they should be. Miles Teller’s character of Rooster is a perfect example of this. Rooster carries a big piece of the emotional weight of this story but the film doesn’t focus on his character when he is not in a scene with Maverick.

When a movie has three screenwriters (Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie), things tend to get left on the cutting room floor and with Tom Cruise having a high degree of power, there are fine details that come out as muddied rather than polished.

Despite the 131-minute runtime, the film is well-paced so an extra 15 minutes could have gone a long way towards patching up some minor issues with the storytelling.

Photo by Scott Garfield/Scott Garfield – © 2022 Paramount Pictures Corporation. All rights reserved.

A lot has changed since 1986, Top Gun: Maverick takes full advantage of the upgrade in technology not just in its vehicles but in filmmaking as well. Tom Cruise may be an insane perfectionist but without him, we wouldn’t have gotten what amounts to the best film in 2022 so far.

 

4.5/5

 

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