The Power of Perseverance in Tom Cruise’s “Top Gun: Maverick”

Warning: Spoilers ahead for the film if you have not already seen it.

By Steve Price

In 1986, the world was introduced to the character of Pete Mitchell, callsign “Maverick”, a naval aviator central to the box office hit that was Top Gun. Revolving around Maverick and his radar intercept officer (RIO) Nick “Goose” Bradshaw navigating the ins and outs of the U.S. Navy’s school for gifted fighter pilots, the movie was a cultural touchstone of the 1980s and helped launch Tom Cruise into superstardom, becoming a seminal ‘80s action film that still gets play on the air to this day. For years afterward, young men and women enthralled with the captivating dogfight sequences dreamed of becoming fighter pilots themselves, taking to the sky in their own F-14 Tomcats (or, in the case of our illustrious founder, the magnificent F-4 Phantom) and shooting down MiGs.

It should serve as no surprise that the wildly popular film would get a sequel; the surprising element is that it took over a quarter-century to get there with it. Stuck in development limbo for years with production challenges and the time demands on the lead star, many were taken aback when the sequel was even announced, questioning if a second film was even feasible after so long following the first. Many more were concerned about the propensity for sequels to be little more than cash grabs for studios, a fear that instilled concerns that the uniqueness of the original could be retroactively tarnished by a lame-duck sequel.

Top Gun: Maverick was unlike most sequels, however. With a firm hand on the nostalgia switch to instill a sense of continuity between the original and the sequel, the second film dares to take on new challenges with the power of new camera technology, putting people into the cockpit once more for a wild, rip-roaring adventure across beautifully shot cinematography, incredible sound effects and the machismo of a diverse, well-rounded cast. Blowing past the $1 Billion USD mark globally, the film not only smashed the competition at the box office this year, but it trounced the original film’s box office haul by a wide margin. The result of this smash hit was a film that had an important message to teach in betwixt the action.

The film picks up in the modern day with Maverick testing scramjets for the Navy, drawing the ire of his commanders over the preceding thirty years for his penchant for insubordination. After crashing his prototype following a successful flight past Mach 10, Maverick is called back to Top Gun at NAS North Island to help train a group of returning graduates on a dangerous mission to destroy a rogue uranium enrichment facility in an unnamed country. Once there, he finds himself at odds not only with the school’s commander [Jon Hamm], but also the son of his late friend Goose, Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw [Miles Teller], whom he helped to bounce out of the Naval Academy at the bequest of his late mother (played in the original by Meg Ryan).

Finding solace in his friendship with former rival, the dying Pacific Fleet Commander Tom “Iceman” Kazansky [Val Kilmer] and former flame and local bartender Penny Benjamin [Jennifer Connelly], Maverick attempts to drill his cocky students into order to complete the insidiously difficult mission, with multiple students nearly dying in accidents during the training. All the while, Maverick must face the growing challenges to his career and livelihood, confessing at one point that being a fighter pilot is not what he does, but rather, who he is – a fact lost on dispassionate commanders who are ready to relegate him to the dustbin of Navy history. Only after he manages to complete the training regimen where all his cadets had failed does he finally earn the right to fly on the mission himself and lead his team through the climatic air battle where all hell breaks loose.

The film is of course primarily rooted in its action, and more the power to it for it does those action scenes brilliantly. The cinematography in Top Gun: Maverick is astoundingly brilliant, with the filmmakers having close cooperation with the U.S. military to achieve some of their heart-stopping shots. The cast does their part amicably, with standout Miles Teller in particular doing a wonderful job evoking echoes of Anthony Edwards’s performance from the original, very much portraying the character of Rooster as one could imagine Goose’s son behaving. Jennifer Connelly fills the void left by the absence of Kelly McGillis from the original, helping to shape the narrative of Maverick’s advancing years quite nicely.

At the end of the day, however, this film is predicated on the performance of one man – the lead, Tom Cruise, upon which the success of the movie is wholly based. Compared to the Maverick of the original Top Gun, the brash and youthful fighter pilot with something to prove, Tom Cruise’s Maverick in the sequel is older, wiser, but still a rogue at heart. Playing fast and loose with the rules to accomplish the task at hand, Cruise shows us a new side of Maverick: the vulnerability to time that we all succumb to ultimately. Maverick spends the entire film acutely aware that his time as a naval aviator is winding down, forcing him to fight ever harder to keep his way of life intact.

Therein lies the true heart of Top Gun: Maverick by the time the credits roll: the perseverance of its main character lies at the heart of a central thesis that enraptured audiences all over the world this summer. Even after being shot down in the line of duty, there was no quit in our heroes, leading to one of the best film payoffs in recent memory. Hard work and dedication are virtues that never go out of style, but the film goes one level deeper than that, into the virtue of perseverance against all odds. It is one thing to put in a hard day’s work; it is another to put in a hard day’s work when the whole of the world is against you and the clock is ticking. In those moments, we find out what we are truly made of, testing our mettle against the grindstone and finding levels of ingenuity and toughness that we may not have been cognizant of beforehand.

Top Gun: Maverick is a wild ride, and one that any film lover should be apt to take on now that the film has found wide release to streaming services. It challenges us to reflect on where we have gone in the thirty-six years since Top Gun entered our lives, for those among us old enough to remember the days when it first arrived. But it also challenges us to face opposition head on, with no regrets, because at the end of the day, what we do in this life is as much an extension of who we are as anything. And to persevere against obstacles great or small, that is to live the Well-Sewn life.