First off, let me admit that, unlike nearly everyone else in my age group, I’ve never seen the original TOP GUN; for some reason, our household in the ’80s & ’90s just was not a Tom Cruise-filmgoing household, and I somehow managed to miss it on HBO and every other cable channel as well. My filmgoing has lots of weird gaps like that; like, I’d never seen JAWS until it came out on Blu-Ray. And yet, through the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE films I’ve come around to the Church of Cruise, Patron Saint of Cinema who continues to cheat death for our entertainment — at this point, it would feel wrong not to bear witness to his latest half-mad feat of filmmaking. Thing is, despite not actually having seen the original ’80s film, a lot felt familiar here just through cultural osmosis — ah yes, there’s “Highway to the Danger Zone,” there’s Harold Faltermeyer’s extremely ’80s synth theme, there’s Tom Cruise on a motorcycle racing a jet at the golden hour, and so on.
Mercifully, Joseph Kosinski’s film (his second sequel to a beloved ’80s flick in about a decade; his directorial debut was 2010’s TRON: LEGACY) gives you everything you need to know to understand what’s going on. Tom Cruise is Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a perpetual loose cannon Naval aviator who has deliberately avoided promotion in order to keep flying planes well into his fifties. Having danced between the lines of regulations yet again, before he can be reprimanded his former wingman, Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazanski (Val Kilmer), orders him back to TOPGUN as an instructor to prepare the current best of the best for an incredibly dangerous mission that — let’s face it — is basically the trench run from the original STAR WARS.