The moments that make movies | Top Gun: Maverick — Flying into the danger zone

Often all it takes is a scare, a car chase, a musical number or a meet-cute for a movie to forever be etched in our memories. The moment may be an image you can’t shake off or a whole sequence of them. This series will profile such immortal moments that encapsulate the essence of a movie, a genre and the medium itself.

Sequels make for easy punching bags. For good reason. Most are lazy cash-ins. A rare few manage to capture lightning in a bottle a second time. Even rarer is a sequel that eclipses the original. When a sequel to _Top Gun_ was announced, it is hard to imagine too many were excited about it. Truth be told, the movie may have been a persuasive recruitment commercial for the US Navy and its Air Force, but it was ‘80s cheese that had already grown stale by the end of the ‘80s and never really felt sequel-worthy. But boy, did _Top Gun: Maverick_ prove us wrong. While Joseph Kosinski modelled his movie on Tony Scott’s 1986 original, he also managed to eclipse it in just about every respect. Tom Cruise, the military hardware, the dog fights, the emotional beats all got an upgrade. The uber-machismo got toned down a little. The one complaint should be the laughably chaste romance between Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell and Jennifer Connelly’s Penny Benjamin which sure didn’t take anyone’s breath away.

If Top Gun: Maverick’s billion-dollar haul at the box office tells us anything, it’s that we have been so starved of well-made action movies in the age of green screens. It was the antidote we needed for the monotony of standard Marvel fare. Watching the flight sequences, the pulse quickens over the electrifying drama. Sights, sounds and speed act as a unifying force in an assault on our senses. When the engine roars, our knees tremble. When the jets soar, dive, swoop and pirouette like they were in a musical number, the adrenaline rush trickles into the rest of the body. If you walk out of the theatre spent, it’s because the movie not only sold you on the thrill of dogfighting, but the jet lag that comes from the experience.

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In the movie, the mission, should Maverick choose to accept it, is to train a dozen young Top Gun graduates to infiltrate an enemy base, destroy a secret uranium enrichment plant, and escape without drawing the attention of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and enemy fighter jets — all under two minutes and 30 seconds. An impossible mission indeed that demands a combination of precision, audacity, improv skills and a maverick at the helm. The mission parameters may recall the Death Star attack in Star Wars, another mission which didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of success if not for a maverick pilot. Go back a little further: the 1955 film The Dam Busters too required British fighter pilots to destroy dams critical to Nazi Germany’s cause and protected by anti-aircraft guns. But Vice Admiral Beau “Cyclone” Simpson ( Jon Hamm) isn’t entirely convinced. When he tweaks the parameters and suggests an alternate plan that is a little more doable but also more suicidal, Maverick disapproves in the most Maverick way: he makes an unauthorised flight and completes the training simulation well within the time limit. In this race against the clock sequence, you almost forget to breathe.

When it comes to flight sequences in Top Gun: Maverick, we are obviously spoilt for choice. Each sequence carries its own weight and brings its own momentum. But it’s the execution of the climactic mission — and all the ensuing complications — that makes the movie. Tension builds to a pulsing and bruising rhythm with each moment in the sequence. The enemy’s uranium enrichment plant lies in a deep valley surrounded by snowbound mountains. To get to the target, Maverick and his team fly through a canyon at low altitude to avoid the radar of the enemy’s SAM turrets. Not to mention the edge of the mountains while coming in at hypersonic speeds. Kosinski and his DP Claudio Miranda take full advantage of the topography and the challenges it poses to design the choreography for the sequence. On reaching the valley, they drop their bombs dead on target. But as they swoop up against the face-melting pressure of gravitational forces to escape, a SAM gets a lock on Rooster ( Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s best friend Goose who dies in the original. Still blaming himself for Goose’s death, Maverick swoops in for the rescue, vaults over Rooster’s jet, launches a shower of flares to divert the missiles, uses his own jet to shield Rooster, takes a hit, and ejects just in time before going down in enemy territory. Waking up face down in the snow, he is hunted by an enemy gunship. Rooster now comes to his rescue, shoots the gunship down, only to be shot down by another missile. Cue: emotional reunion. The two then sneak onto an enemy base, steal an F-14 Tomcat (what Maverick flew in the original) just lying unprotected for narrative convenience, and make an impossible escape back to home base — not before taking out two much more advanced fighters.

There is a grace, coherence and a clear sense of spatial orientation to this sequence. Qualities often amiss in today’s action movies which tend to prioritise rat-a-tat cross-cutting. What may have been used initially to hide the stunt double has become the go-to tool to give a sequence a forward momentum. In Top Gun: Maverick, our sensory response stems not from hyperactive editing choices, but from the action itself. Longer takes that mix wide shots with close-ups allows the viewer to actually stay in a scene and take in the spectacle. The editing is functional at best, and the CGI bare minimum. What is prized foremost is choreography, which not only pertains to the pacing and rhythm of the set piece, but how the onboard set-up works in sync with the other cameras, and how the moving images and the sound design complement each other. All of this feeds into the illusion that we are in the cockpit flying with Maverick at supersonic speeds.

The most propulsive action sequences understand the nature of action lies in cause and effect. How one moment follows the other. How the character responds to a change in his environment. So, a reaction shot is as vital as the action. When we see Cruise and other actors’ facial muscles being flattened and contorted into a grimace by the extremity of G-forces, this tangible texture to the action strengthens our immersion. Knowing these actors are performing these stunts themselves makes it all the more real, and puts us right at the edge of our seats. The emphasis here is not on narrative realism, but an enveloping subjectivity that simulates the feeling of being inside a supersonic jet.

During production, the actors and directors worked in tandem with actual pilots to push the level of immersion possible in the flight sequences. Cruise organised a three-month boot camp to familiarise the actors with how to operate a fighter jet and the cameras fitted in them. “We worked with the Navy and the Top Gun school to formulate how to shoot it practically. Because if we’re going to do it, we’re going to fly in the F-18s,” Cruise described his training module in a featurette. “I started them out in single-engine airplanes, to build out their spatial awareness inside the aircraft. Next, we took them to the L-39, and they went and flew aerobatics to feel what it’s like in a jet…I had to really teach them cinematography and lighting so that they understood what’s going to look good on camera.”

Top Gun: Maverick re-introduces us to its flagship character in a riveting sequence that acts as a great statement of artistic intent. What may have been a climax in another movie is fed to us as an appetiser. We watch Maverick, in direct defiance of a rear admiral’s order, push a prototype jet dubbed “Darkstar” beyond Mach 10. Though he succeeds in his attempt to break the sound barrier, he also ends up destroying the jet. But being Maverick, he somehow makes it out alive. “Despite your best efforts, you just refuse to die,” Rear Admiral Hammer (Ed Harris) chastises. He could very well be talking about Ethan Hunt or Cruise himself. For the movie is not only a paean to Maverick, but also the star embodying him. And what better word describes Cruise’s desire to do things his own way than “maverick.” When Hammer warns him, “Your kind is headed for extinction,” quick comes the response: “Maybe so, sir. But not today.” Hammer may be talking about the obsolescence of fighter pilots with the advent of drones. But Maverick’s response can also be read as a defiant riposte to industrialised, made-by-committee blockbusters from Hollywood’s last action hero, a man pushing a machine beyond its limit.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru.

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