Thirty-six years after the original,Top Gun: Maverickeulogizes the actors entire career.
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Whats even weirder:Maverickappears to recognize this.
Its a moment that encapsulates the whole movie.
Most of all, it was about Tom Cruise and the unforeseen astronomical event that was his smile.
It reads as a eulogy for Maverick and, by extension, Cruise himself.
Maverick moves through the film like a messenger from a dying world.
As someone tells him early on, The future is coming, and youre not in it.
(If you want an inexact comparison, consider what happened to Leonardo DiCaprios persona withTitanic.)
By that point, it may well have been a matter of survival.
His films were regularly underperforming.
Female viewers, once a reliable demographic, turned on him.
For some years,Mission: Impossibleentries have been his only reliable moneymakers.
Through them, Cruise has clawed his way back to respectability.
And he has done so in an oddly poetic way: by suffering onscreen.
Hes become known for those films spectacular stunts, many of which he conceives of and performs himself.
Once Hollywoods It boy bright, gleaming, untouchable Cruisefought back into our good gracesby bleeding for us.
The level of authenticity achieved is, quite frankly, astonishing.
Cruises best performances were always extensions of his driven, all-American go-getter persona the persona the originalTop Gunhelped create.
On the ground, however, he displays a strange hesitancy, a fearfulness hiding behind that ever-present smile.
Even Cruises remarkably well-preserved face and physique add to his out-of-time and out-of-place aura.
Dialogue continually hints at the possibility, maybe even the probability, of his demise.
Your kind is headed for extinction.)
The heavy aircraft canopies that close around them when they enter their planes look eerily like coffin lids.
Even the flyers jargon for the cockpit the box is morbid.
It certainly seems like it might be Mavericks time to go.
Maverickis enormously entertaining, but watching it makes for a surprisingly emotional experience.
The villains were rarely seen and never actually named.
Superpower conflict was sublimated into Maverick and Icemans race to be the best pilot in their graduating class.
This time around, the enemy once again remains unnamed and unseen.
Its not the Soviets, thats for sure.
Rather, were told, its a rogue nation that is trying to enrich uranium.
But it also happens to possess fifth-generation aircraft superior to anything in the U.S. arsenal.
(Thats presumably why so many of them are about fighting aliens from other dimensions.)
Military fantasies of the kind the firstTop Gunsold have become largely extinct on our screens.
Which is maybe whyMavericktakes place in such an otherworldly environment.
But this time, the whole film seems to be playing out on the far edges of the empire.
Never have fighters zooming across the screen looked so thrilling and felt so resoundingly, so gorgeously sad.
This is also the universe in which Kosinski best operates.
The movie is its own ghost.
Top Gun: Maverickis in theaters May 24.
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