When it comes to picking a best picture winner, there are many factors that may sway Oscar voters. Great performances, gorgeous cinematography, cultural relevance – all significant, sure. But if I had a ballot, I would go with the film Steven Spielberg reckons saved the entire industry: Top Gun: Maverick.
Spielberg’s breathless aside to Tom Cruise at the Oscar nominees luncheon in February – “You saved Hollywood’s ass and you might have saved theatrical distribution” – was notable for who was saying it, but wasn’t exactly an original observation. After all, people have been calling Top Gun Maverick cinema’s saviour ever since it roared into multiplexes last summer, and quickly grossed $1.5 billion. What’s more, they’re right. Maverick’s success, according to Forbes, “made the difference between a halfway decent summer season and a product-starved catastrophe” in 2022, when cinemas were otherwise starved of releases. This was a period when Cineworld filed for bankruptcy protection, so it doesn’t seem a stretch to suggest that quite a few cinema chains, not to mention independents, would have been staring into the abyss were it not for an ageless A-lister and his battered F-14.
But Top Gun: Maverick’s “saviour of cinema” status isn’t just down to the financials. If it were, then Avatar: the Way of Water, which grossed even more, would arguably hold an even stronger claim to the title. No, Maverick did something more than just make an aircraft hangar’s worth of dosh: it reminded viewers of the purpose of cinemas – of why, even in an age of near-simultaneous home streaming releases and TVs the size of squash courts, nothing can match that rush of colour and sound coming at you in darkened room with a load of other people.
Top Gun: Maverick revels in that cinematic rush from its very first scene, a gasp-inducing set piece that sees Cruise’s speed-needing airman Pete “Maverick” Mitchell attempt to reach the previously unreached by humans (and, in reality, almost certainly unreachable) velocity of Mach 10. A big clue as to why the film chimed so much with audiences is right there on Cruise’s face as he sweats and grimaces through the G-force. As much as possible of what we’re seeing on screen is real: the actors really did fly in fighter jets (albeit as passengers rather than pilots), and Cruise dragged the cast on to a brutal three-month training programme to prepare them for the intensity of flying at such speeds. The results can be seen on the screen in those thrilling time trials and dogfights: action scenes that genuinely pop, a rarity in a sea of muddy superhero CGI.
Of course, Tom Cruise is, himself, essentially CGI at this point, not only in terms of that curiously unchanging face, but also in his willingness to attempt things with his body that other actors can’t – or, more likely, won’t. Cruise isn’t really about range any more – as plenty have pointed out, there’s only a sliver of difference between his Maverick and Ethan Hunt from the Mission: Impossible films. But in its place is the sense of him pushing the one role he plays these days to its furthest extremes, turning in the same performance but bigger, faster, better. Watching him furiously fighting away against time itself is gripping cinema in its own right. “The future is coming – and you’re not in it,” Ed Harris’s withering rear admiral warns Maverick early in the film. Good luck telling Cruise that.
Cruise is supported by a savvily selected crew of up-and-comers (Glen Powell, Monica Barbaro, Lewis Pullman) and both grizzled and not-so-grizzled vets (Harris, Jon Hamm, Jennifer Connelly). Miles Teller, an actor who for so long seemed incapable of escaping his real-world reputation for being, as a notorious Esquire profile put it, “a bit of a dick”, parlays that surly obnoxiousness into his role as Rooster, the irascible son of Maverick’s dearly departed radio interceptor, Goose.
And then there’s Val Kilmer, reprising his role as Maverick’s old frenemy Iceman, who, like the actor playing him, has throat cancer and struggles to speak. Kilmer’s single scene with Cruise is, in contrast to the daredevil aeronautics elsewhere, fairly minimalist: just two men communicating through a desktop computer and a series of knowing looks. But the body language between them is so freighted with meaning, decades on from their first meeting, that it’s impossible not to get swept up in the gravity of the moment.
Top Gun: Maverick is a heady brew of nostalgia. But it is nostalgia – as one of Jon Hamm’s other characters once so memorably explained – in the original Greek sense of the term. It gives us the dopamine hit of familiarity, sure – but occasionally elicits a more complicated, painful feeling, too: the sense of chasing something lost. Yes, it’s a sequel. Yes, it does basically follow the same flight path as the original. Yes, you know exactly where it is going to land. But it is skilfully made blockbuster cinema that connects with something deeper, too. It’s why so many people have gone back to cinema again and again to experience that rush of wheels leaving asphalt. And when it comes to best picture, that should count for something.
