There's a lot that winds people up about Tom Cruise — the maniacal sofa-jumping on Oprah; ahem, Scientology — and this past week, it was disrespecting the Queen by using an interview about her Platinum Jubliee to plug Top Gun: Maverick. But as that amusing faux pas proved, one thing is unequivocal: very few are standing up for the big-budget, IMAX-your-face-off blockbuster like he is.
Top Gun: Maverick, presumed by many to be a dud before it was finally seen by members of the press over the last fortnight, is just the latest example of the 59-year-old's commitment to a Hollywood mode of old. Kinetic event cinema that you can feel, that makes you feel, unrestrained by the uncanny valley of greenscreens and impassive CGI.
It's nostalgic, without capitulating to finger-pointing familiarity or maudlin, politically dubious evocations of an America relegated to the history books. Tracks like Kenny Loggins' “Danger Zone” tip a loving hat to the first Top Gun, as does its synthy '80s soundtrack, without feeling beholden to the past. As a sequel, it operates in a way that sequels so rarely do nowadays: well-loved characters are meaningfully developed, and it evolves technically so as to outshine its predecessor, not least in huge debt to the use of physical sets and actual jet fighters, the titular Top Guns shot in the seats of real cockpits.
Cruise's fingerprints are all over its success. According to an interview with Empire (via USA Today) from last year, in which they spoke to super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, the actor “put in a request” to fly the actual F-18, ultimately denied clearance by the Navy. But there was a compromise: instead, IMAX cameras were installed into the cockpits of F-18s flown by Navy pilots qualified to, you know, actually handle a multi-million dollar military machine. (And Cruise himself did get to fly an actual P-51 propeller-driven fighter plane).
Bruckheimer wasn't kidding when he said it gives audiences the experience of “what it's like to be in an F-18 in that cockpit with those pilots” — it's far from an embellishment, in this case, to anoint it cinema-as-theme park ride, a thrill from which you emerge absolutely exhilarated, in a way no big-budget studio feature has managed to do since George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road. You wince at the jets rocketing towards the lens; you dip and dart your head from inside the cockpit, because for all intents and purposes, you're actually there.
According to the same interview, Cruise put his co-stars through an intense “aerial boot camp,” ensuring that they could handle the thrilling flights (in the passenger seat, but alas). “When you're pulling heavy Gs, it compresses your spine, your skull. It makes some people delirious. Some people can't handle it,” he told the magazine, sounding as casual and laid-back as one can seem talking about death-defying stuntwork. “So I had to get them up to be able to sustain high Gs. Because they have to act in the plane. I can't have them sick the whole time.”
The now-standard movie-making mode, of course, would dodge all of this by sticking the actors — especially stars who demand big pay checks, like Miles Teller — in flimsy models in front of green screens, letting CGI do all the hefty legwork. Not with Cruise at the wheel. Not Top Gun 2. There're no digitalised shortcuts, no PS5-esque, slightly unreal renderings of expansive vistas, of planes rocketing through the skies at Mach 9. And the result is genuinely tangible, just as the brutal physicality, the shaking engines and pungent oil, could be felt and smelt in Fury Road.
The actors themselves had to do all of the camerawork, given a 101 on lighting, cinematography, editing. “I had to teach them how to turn the cameras on and off, and about camera angles and lenses,” Cruise told Empire. “We didn't have unlimited time in these jets.” There're few better to learn from than a seasoned stuntman like Cruise himself, one of the few actors to hang off planes (Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation) and climb monstrous towers like the Burj Khalifa (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol). But it's not just the stunt — it's being able to act through the stunt, to conduct believable emotionality. “You had to be incredibly efficient,” recalls Teller. No kidding.
The result is incomparable. It's exactly what a loud-and-proud studio movie should do: transport you to a different place, into entirely different shoes from the banal rigmarole of our day-to-day. Thank god for Tom Cruise standing up for it.
Top Gun: Maverick flies into UK cinemas on 24 May.
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