CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

TOP GUN MAVERICK WITH TOM CRUISE

The 2022 version quite simply acts as a remake: the identical scenes follow one another, playing on the same codes and the same narrative axes, using the same little sentences that kill.

The Maverick that we left in 1986 after 1h50 of film seems forced to relive the same sequence identically, Age of Tomorrow style.

And yet, Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick are fraternal twins.

A little hint of nostalgia is already missing from the Top Gun reunion promised by the second installment, which is released in France on May 25.

If Maverick and Iceman will be reunited, we will not see Charlie again. There was no question of re-casting Kelly McGillis for the simple reason that her character does not appear in the Tom Gun script:

maverick. Exit her role as an instructor and her romance with the hero embodied by Tom Cruise, so, thirty years after the events of the story released in 1986, the whole issue for director Joseph Kosinski was not to "always look in the 'back " :

"[The first installment stories] aren't stories we're pitching" for the sequel, he told Insider.

For the director, it was “important to introduce new characters […] It was an incredible opportunity to integrate the character of Jennifer Connelly. The 51-year-old actress plays Penny Benjamin, the romantic protagonist of this new era for Top Gun.

Top Gun wasn't the hottest movie of the 1980s. But still, young Tom Cruise, with his crooked teeth and beatnik smile, Charlie's (Kelly McGillis) wavy hair and penetrating gaze, had something hot.

We see again with excitement this scene where, invited to dinner at his teacher's house, Pete Mitchell asks him if he can "take a shower", before discussing everything and nothing on the patio. The shower is taken by Top Gun: Maverick. Never has a sex scene been so stark as the one that brings together Tom Cruise and Penny (Jennifer Connely) in the single mother's attic. So nothing happens on the screen that one comes to doubt that they really slept together.

Top Gun was a height of homoeroticism, but Maverick does not seem determined to take over this part of the legacy of Tony Scott's blockbuster. The modest love between Pete Mitchell and the one who shared his cockpit, Goose (Anthony Edwards), died with the co-pilot. This love, which unfolded with great blows of hefty, bare-chested guys in the locker rooms of the flight school, is replaced by a good old conflicting father-son relationship between Tom Cruise and Goose's son.

Goose, original co-pilot of Pete Mitchell, died in the crash of his plane, after having ejected in flight. The experience, traumatic for Pete Mitchell, is all the more so for the widow of Goose and their infant, Bradley.

Thirty-five years have passed but the son has forgiven nothing for his father's co-pilot, especially since he rotted his record at flight school, for reasons he does not know.

Miles Teller was given the heavy task of playing the role of Bradley Bradshaw: a character torn between his resentment towards Pete Mitchell and his sense of military duty.

Teller delivers a fair and sensitive performance of this character. And the narrative axis it carries is crucial, but let's say no more.

And for aviation enthusiasts: In Maverick, Top Gun students no longer fly Grumman F-14 Tomcats like in 1986, but Boeing F-18 Super Hornets. The enemy MiGs have disappeared, like the red star on their bodywork...

The voice of Val Kilmer (Iceman) is a subject that, today, is not funny.

The actor, a huge fallen Hollywood star, underwent a tracheotomy in 2017, following throat cancer. Unable to speak, he is voiced by an artificial intelligence in Top Gun: Maverick. Which allows his character to express himself to taunt this devil of Pete Mitchell: “From you or me, Pete, who is the best driver ? smiles Iceman.

Response from Tom Cruise: "We had such a good time so far."