Top Gun: Maverick, Sequels and Nostalgia’s Moving Target

There was a four-hour stretch in 1986 that I thought being a fighter pilot would be pretty damn cool. Those were the two hours that I sat and watched Top Gun and the two hours after in which I imagined sitting in the cockpit of an F-14 Tomcat, scorching Migs in the Indian Ocean and working to stay above the hard deck. It’s a fleeting memory, though one I’ve held on to through about 10+ rewatches of the movie over the last couple of decades.

So much of that came speeding back at Mach 9 while I was sitting in the theater watching Top Gun: Maverick that it felt almost like I was in a flat spin at times. It was visceral in a way that I’m not sure I’ve had with movies before.

I’m overly nostalgic for things in my own life. I recognize this in myself. I’m a sucker for coming-of-age movies and stories that remind me of my childhood. I think back on growing up with great fondness even if I probably (definitely) thought it sucked at the time. I’m sure I’ve romanticized certain aspects of my life to better fit a tidy reality, to mirror a movie.

Around this, I’m also totally fine. There’s almost definitely a disconnect there, but that’s the thing with nostalgia: the personal associations and wistful nature of the concept are meant to shield you from reality. I’ve accepted it, even embraced it in my later years. It makes growing old easier.

And along these lines, at least in the movie world, it’s not easy making sequels to movies for a lot of different reasons. It takes continued stories that work within the narrative confines of the first film. It takes buy-in from basically everyone who was part of it the first time around. It often means considerably more money because the stakes need to get raised and everyone wants to get paid more.

There’s a lot working against sequels from the jump, and it’s why so many of them fail to live up to the original. But easily the biggest thing working about movie sequels, especially the big ones, is the overwhelming weight of nostalgic expectation. A movie begetting a sequel means folks almost definitely loved the first go-around, and the baseline is that original flick. The second needs to be as good as the first, and then, it probably needs to eclipse it. In some ways, this mirrors our own lives.

So with all these factors working, essentially, against a sequel, it is what makes Top Gun: Maverick such a feat of filmmaking that it’s almost difficult to put into words. Now, is Top Gun: Maverick a perfect movie? No, there are plenty of holes, some of which I’ll get to. But Top Gun: Maverick is a perfect sequel it’s perfectly nostalgic. It should be the bar by which all future movies set themselves when considering how to work a second story into a universe of characters and plot points.

It was the first movie to give itself all the time in the world, and then bring everyone back into that world and make us feel good about it. It’s the first movie I’ve ever seen that understood its past so perfectly that it was willing to forego any future. It was so rooted in what it thought about itself that it made the present-day reality a perfect amalgamation of the two time periods.

If you haven’t seen Top Gun: Maverick yet I’m going to say two things that work in tandem. One: stop reading here because there are Spoilers ahead. And two: make sure you go see it in theaters. 

The beats for Top Gun: Maverick are pretty predictable if you’ve seen the first movie. Tom Cruise’s Pete Maverick Mitchell is still in the Navy, somehow never exceeding the rank of Captain even after all these years. The movie works to explain this in at least a moderately-acceptable way and he’s still flying test jets and pushing the need for speed. This is until he’s called back to Top Gun to train a young group of fighter pilots to perform a near-impossible mission. 

It’s here that the storylines from the first movie wrap themselves in rather tidy bows for the sequel. He needs to come to amends with the son of his former RIO, Goose whose death scene remains one of the truly devastating ones in movie history (at least to me). That son is Bradley ‘Rooster’ Bradshaw (Miles Teller) who conveniently wears the same clothes as Goose, sings the same songs (“Great Balls of Fire” anyone?), and harbors significant resentment towards Maverick.

Plus there’s Jennifer Connelly’s Penny Benjamin, the Admiral’s daughter referred to in the first movie, the source of much of Maverick’s military hierarchal issues. We never see her in the first one obviously but there’s a love interest at least. And he’s also able to meet with Val Kilmer’s Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky who’s attained the rank of Admiral, but is suffering from cancer, can’t talk (like Val Kilmer in real life), and sees Cruise’s Maverick for what he is, a dude suffering the tragedies of the past. 

There’s a certain surreal abstractness to what’s happening in Top Gun: Maverick, especially in the interactions between the characters. The dialogue is a little too perfect and on the nose. There’s a surface-level quality to the back and forth in a way that suggests the filmmakers really didn’t care. They wanted to make most of this digestible enough so as to not deviate too much from the primary objective: to make us remember ourselves watching the original. In this way, I think they understood the assignment. Don’t deviate from the course, but get us to remember our younger selves just in an updated version. I loved the “effort”. 

It’s hard to draw on nostalgia in the same ways these days. The internet has, in some way, ruined this concept by making nostalgia readily accessible, or at least easy to purchase if you want to have elements of your childhood around you. Sure, there’s still a nostalgic level of remembering that keeps these things relevant, able to look at them as touchpoints from a bygone time you remember so fondly.

But it’s all pretty fucking easy to do if you want it. Cue up a song on Spotify, buy some retro thing off the internet, and stream every movie you loved from the 1980s and 90s (or whatever). The past isn’t really the past anymore, it’s just what we make of it in the present.

So grasping onto nostalgic elements, in whatever form they can take, feels as crucial now as ever. It’s almost like a currency in that the most authentic aspects of it become the most important. This is what Top Gun: Maverick does well. It doesn’t eschew the past in an effort to “update” the story, but rather embraces all the cheesy goodness it once had to offer, and then only magnifies it in a way you can truly appreciate.

The opening sequence with the “Top Gun Anthem” and Kenny Loggins's “Highway to the Danger Zone” right behind it come as reminders that this sequel won’t deviate too much from what got it there. There’s an “old” feeling to this movie to start even if it updates fast. That’s on purpose. The movie isn’t old, but the beats are. The action is as engaging as ever (again, see this in the theaters, please) but only working off it’s predecessor.

Old is a relative term I suppose. You are only old if you feel that way. I remember watching Top Gun for the first time in Palatine, Illinois, and recreating the scenes with my friends (“I was inverted” was something we actually said to each other). We were young and didn’t understand. But here’s the thing, we didn’t need to. And we still don’t. That’s the perfect thing about this movie. All the dumb things that happened the first time happened again with the movie doing it somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but not really.

I don’t think many of us want to relive our childhood. But I do think many of us would like to “follow up” on it. To check back in, to just digest, dissect, and discern what actually happened. And I think we’d like a chance to follow up that check-in with a wistful story about why it all “meant something”. That there’s a meaningful second act to all of those first relationships and occurrences. That the things we held on to tightly mattered for what we became. That we’ll see our younger selves in contrast to what we are in the now. Or that maybe we’ll hit just hit Mach 10 at some point and burn up hard and bright.