Top Gun Maverick IMAX Review: A Film That Truly Soars

Brent Simon brings us this Top Gun Maverick IMAX review and teases just how incredible this film will be on the big screen when it lands in UK cinemas May 27th.

After more than 30 years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is where he belongs, pushing the envelope as a courageous test pilot and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him.

Training a detachment of graduates for a special assignment, Maverick must confront the ghosts of his past and his deepest fears, culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who choose to fly it.

Tentpole franchises, a cinematic business strategy employed for decades, has seen studios pump outsized resources into big-budget genre movies.

This provides some measure of economic stability (reliably giving low-demand audiences consistent servings of what they want), while then also allowing studios to service a slate of arguably somewhat more ambitious offerings for a wider variety of moviegoers.

It was a formula that, while not without its drawbacks, largely worked.

But of course times and marketplaces change. So as Hollywood studios have consolidated and pivoted further away from risk in an effort to better compete with the encroach of streaming services, they’ve modified a bit and leaned into an even broader groomed management of “intellectual property,” an approach which has included re-tilling the earth of seemingly every previously successful film.

This has meant sequels and spin-offs, of course, but also so-called “legacyquels,” or movies which try to thread a certain needle between sequel and outright remake or re-boot — servicing fans hungry for nostalgia, while also introducing a new property to younger audiences who might not have even been born when the original film was released.

Of this type of film, many have struggled mightily, and come across as clumsy and cringe-inducing — big, and somewhat dumb, exercises in rib-nudging remembrance that in their efforts to please everyone ends up satisfying no one. (The latest Scream, at least, had some fun with this, unpacking the trend within the horror genre in very meta, rascally fashion.)

Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick, however, seemingly cracks the formula, striking an artful balance of old and new, universal and personal, simple and somewhat more complex.

Born of a long and winding development road, lasting more than a decade and enduring everything from changes in narrative focus to production delays and pandemic-related release postponements, the movie — which finds Cruise reprising the role of hotshot United States Navy fighter pilot Peter Mitchell, now tasked with bringing a group of equally cocky young pilots up to speed for a mission — is an engaging example of multi-quadrant blockbuster entertainment done right.

The original Top Gun, released in 1986, went on to rack up a $353 million worldwide box office gross, and catapult Cruise to legitimate international mega-stardom.

It was also, crucially and instructively, the film which first saw Cruise exercise his burgeoning star power and really dedicate his considerable energies, in a very granular way, into understanding how (to try, at least) to make his movies as crowd-pleasing as possible.

He demanded (and received) an extensive workshopping of the screenplay prior to shooting, as well as the right to sit in on and observe pre-production meetings of various departments, plus the edit bay work of director Tony Scott.

This approach helped give Cruise a much more generously rounded view of moviemaking. In full-circle fashion, all of these lessons are now applied in Top Gun: Maverick.

The story takes place in the present day, where after more than three decades of service, Mitchell, still better known by his call sign “Maverick,” hasn’t advanced past the rank of captain, despite a distinguished service record both in combat and other special operations.

The reason? His penchant for bullheaded rules-breaking and daredevil risk-taking remains intact.

After an opening sequence in which he pushes past the limits of a Mach 9 test flight, Maverick faces another dressing down.

Instead, former rival-turned-friend Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer), now an admiral, plucks Maverick from this career purgatory, with a special job in mind: training a specially chosen group of elite Top Gun graduates, on a tight deadline, for a difficult mission whose target is an underground military bunker on the brink of achieving uranium enrichment capability.

Once on site, Maverick reconnects with an old flame, bar owner Penelope Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly), and also encounters a group of pilots every bit as talented as him in his prime.

These include Natasha “Phoenix” Trace (Monica Barbaro); arrogant Jake “Hangman” Seresin (Glen Powell); and Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s late friend “Goose.”

Forced to confront some of the ghosts of his own past while also pushing these young pilots, and their aircraft, further than what his superior Beau “Cyclone” Simpson (Jon Hamm) thinks is even possible, Maverick must ultimately decide whether the ultimate sacrifice this mission seemingly demands is worth it — for either himself or his trainees.

Director Joseph Kosinski worked with Cruise previously, on 2013’s post-apocalyptic adventure film Oblivion, which was based on Kosinski’s own unpublished graphic novel of the same name.

This obviously informs a sense of general trust between star and helmer, but it also provides experience from the latter with leveraging Cruise’s considerable wattage — when it works best for the movie to wrap its arms around it a bit, and when it’s better to back-burner some of those instincts, in order to serve the story, and other characters.

Additionally, Kosinski also has his own experience with “legacyquels,” having made his feature debut with 2010’s imaginative Tron: Legacy, and that film’s comfort and skill with a blended narrative and characters seems to mark Maverick’s successes as no small coincidence.

Of course, instincts matter only as much as actual material, and Kosinski is considerably abetted by a much-workshopped script, credited to Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie.

At once streamlined and steel-girded, the screenplay is a marvel of intelligent structure and shrewdly outlined and chosen emotional stakes.

The story effectively mines the tension of the relationship between Maverick and Rooster without making it the sole focus, or letting it overwhelm other aspects of the story.

The movie also has a clearly defined military objective, but neither a human nor particular nation-state villain, thus cleaving the sequel from the more jingoistic overtones of its predecessor and making it more universally digestible.

In a knowing nod, there are a couple amusing and rather one-to-one translations of certain iconic sequences from the original film, including a beach football scene swapped in for the much-discussed beach volleyball scene.

Other bits, however (like Penelope being a character referenced in throwaway fashion in the first movie), are integrated in a way that provides some additional context for a hardcore fan or someone who has just recently revisited Top Gun, but doesn’t detract at all for a viewer wholly unfamiliar with it.

Maverick is savvily cast, with relative newcomers like Powell and Barbaro making strong impressions which will provide a likely springboard to sustained careers with a higher profile.

Cruise’s performance, meanwhile, is special. He deploys some tried-and-true ticks and tricks from his movie star grab bag, but also gets a chance to work in deeper emotional waters than one might expect, in cursory glance fashion, from a franchise effort of this type.

Without giving anything specific away, the movie explores the theme of regret in a well-crafted and substantive way that also — since its star is seen as so rigorously disciplined and professionally dogmatic, despite an offscreen life filled with a number of curiosities — can be read as multifaceted if one so chooses.

Finally and most directly, though, on a purely technical level, Top Gun: Maverick delivers in superb fashion.

Fans catching the film on IMAX screens will no doubt be wowed by the presentation.

Working with cinematographer Claudio Miranda (Life of Pi, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), Kosinski shoots thrilling aerial action sequences, all capably cut together by editor Eddie Hamilton in a manner which communicates a clear spatial understanding of these zooming airplanes relative to one another.

This is of course the sweet spot for those seeking more viscerally-oriented escapist fare. Ironically, though, it is everything else which anchors the movie, feeding audience buy-in with its characters and providing deeper and consistent emotional resonance, that allows it to truly soar.

Top Gun Maverick IMAX review by Brent Simon