Top Gun: Maverick

A sequel made thirty-six years later. Maverick is still a pilot. He was never promoted, has caused trouble throughout, and is breaking orders in an experimental aircraft to save a programme. Instead of punishment he is given an assignment. He will go back to his old school and train a group of young pilots for an almost impossible strike. The mission is defined. A narrow valley, low altitude, a hard turn, a window of under two minutes, and defences on the way out. There is one name on the team. Rooster is the son of Maverick's dead friend, and something unspoken sits between them. From there the film is a training story. Flights, times, mistakes and a game on the beach. What the narrative is interested in is not action but obsolescence: the film says throughout that Maverick is considered unnecessary now, and its answer is not a speech but a flight. The flying is real. The actors flew in the back seats of actual fighter aircraft, cameras were fitted inside the cockpits, and most of the footage was not made by computer. For that the cast went through a flight programme lasting months; it was set up at the lead actor's insistence and moved gradually onto heavier aircraft. The scene with an old character was written around the actor's real medical condition, and the difficulty of speech was taken into the narrative. The film was postponed repeatedly during the pandemic and was not given to a streaming platform; opening in cinemas was a deliberate decision. Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell and Val Kilmer are in the cast. Joseph Kosinski directed. Who it is for: anyone who wants action that was actually filmed. Who it is not for: anyone looking for depth of story; the plot is simple and the enemy is never identified.