Top Gun: Maverick, greeted audiences emerging from lockdown with guns a-blazin’, coalescing three declining institutions in its metatext. America, movie theatres, and Tom Cruise may be past their peak, but god dammit, right now they’re still the best in the world.
Preoccupied with youth and experience, the picture was death-tinged, haunted by the specters of Goose as well as Maverick’s onetime rival Iceman, reprised by the ailing Val Kilmer in a curtain call performance preceding his character’s on-screen funeral. It was also meaningfully anachronistic: the film was at once a relic of the 1980s and a Trump-era asset kept in cold storage, having begun shooting in pre-COVID 2018. [The] choice of Maverick’s final shot, a corkscrewed flight into the sunset, might have played very differently only a couple of years before: either a collective dream of release from the anxious Trump reign or a less palatable affirmation of peace through military prowess. Premiering well into the Biden administration, in a decimated theatrical environment and after the last flight out of Kabul, Maverick spoke more to the psychology of the man in the cockpit than to conditions on the ground.
— Adam Nayman (The Ringer)
Synopsis: After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell finds himself training a detachment of TOP GUN graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen.