“Top Gun: Maverick” (2022) is One of the Best Sequels Ever (Part I/II)

9/10

Good sequels are hard to make. Really hard.

That’s because the mere existence of a sequel suggests that the original was pretty good. It’s hard enough to catch a lightening in the bottle once; it’s nearly impossible to do it twice.

Which makes “Top Gun: Maverick” (2022), a sequel to the 1986 “Top Gun,” all the more remarkable.

The story of the sequel involves NATO’s bombing of a uranium enrichment plant in an unnamed country. The plant exists deep within the canons that are protected by surface-to-air missiles, with more advanced enemy jets available to provide air protection in a matter of minutes. This means that the NATO fighter jets need to fly through the canons at low range in a short period of time, strike the target with precision shots and escape with rapid ascent against the canon walls.

Vice Admiral Beau “Cyclone” Simpson (Jon Hamm) has assembled the most accomplished recent graduates of the elite naval fighter pilot training program, known as TOPGUN, for this near-impossible mission. Called into train these pilots is Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchel (Tom Cruise), who himself graduated from the TOPGUN program more than 30 years ago. He’s been able to stay in the navy despite his maverick ways because Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer), his nemesis/friend from “Top Gun”, has protected him over the years.

The set-up of the mission early in the film provides quite a suspense to the fighter pilots’ flying sequences, in ways that the original never did. A major weakness of “Top Gun” was that most of the flying involved Maverick and Kazansky’s fighting for points as they competed to graduate on top of the TOPGUN class. It was hard to get overly excited about pilots’ flying airplanes for a better report card. In the sequel, with a dangerous mission in focus, the stakes are much higher.

All sequels face the difficulty of balancing the nostalgia value of the original with the need for the film to stand on its own, but this was particularly important for “Top Gun: Maverick” because it comes 36 years after the original.

The movie strikes that balance just right. There’s good amount of nostalgia that comes from direct homage to the original. For starters, the opening and closing credits are near replicas. There’s also the reunion of Maverick and Iceman, who is suffering from cancer much like actor Val Kilmer is. The scene between the two, which tells so much with so little, is handled with a lot of class.

(Continued to Part II)