In February, as Russian forces drove towards Kyiv, the Ukrainian people found their first war hero: A young pilot who shot down six Russian planes on the first day of the invasion, becoming the first European fighter ace in 77 years. The Ghost of Kyiv’s name would live forever alongside Eddie Rickenbacker and Chuck Yeager.
The problem was, as a Ukrainian defense official later told the BBC, The Ghost of Kyiv didn’t exist. He was “a super-hero legend created by Ukrainians.” Yes, the Ukrainian Air Force has fought bravely. They were widely expected to be wiped out in hours, but three months into the invasion, they’re still flying, and the feared Russian air wings have been badly mauled. The Ghost of Kyiv, it turns out, was the first salvo in the information war.
Since the days of The Red Baron, governments have recognized the propaganda value of a brave fighter pilot. In World War II, the greatest air ace in American history, Major Dick Bong, was pulled from combat in the Pacific to sell war bonds. In the last days of the Cold War, Americans gained our own fictional hero: Naval Aviator Lt. Pete Mitchell, callsign “Maverick,” played by Tom Cruise in Top Gun. In the summer of 1986, when Top Gun soared at the box office, while Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” and Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” topped the Billboard charts, the Navy saw a 500 percent increase in applications.
Top Gun established director Tony Scott’s reputation as a master visual stylist and made Cruise one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Rumors of a sequel circulated for years, but when Scott died in 2012, the project seemed to die with him. But Cruise, who was scouting locations with Scott two days before the director’s suicide, wouldn’t give up the ship. Now, after years of pandemic delays, Top Gun: Maverick is poised to rule Memorial Day weekend.
After a thoroughly ’80s-syle opening credits montage, which gives us doses of both Harold Faltermeyer’s chiming theme and “Danger Zone,” we catch up with Maverick, who has now been in the Navy for 30 years. By this time, he should either be an admiral, like his frenemy “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer), now the commander of the entire Pacific fleet, or helming the Memphis to Mumbai milk run for FedEx. Instead, Maverick is a test pilot tasked with taking the experimental Darkstar scramjet to Mach 10. When he hears his commanding officer “Hammer” Cain (Ed Harris) is coming to scrap the program so he can devote the test budget to drones, Maverick sets off on one more flight to prove what this puppy can do. He succeeds, but crashes the plane in the process.
Instead of getting court-martialed, he is summoned back to Top Gun school in San Diego. There’s a top secret mission on tap to destroy a nuclear lab in some never-named “enemy”country, and they need Maverick to train the Navy’s top pilots for the suicidally dangerous mission — which just happens to resemble the trench run from Star Wars: A New Hope, but whatever.
The order of the day for director Joseph Kosinski was to ask himself “What would Tony Scott do?” And the answer is almost always, “training montage set to pop music.” Let’s be honest, that’s what we’re here for, right? Top Gun had some classics, including one of the most homoerotic moments of ’80s cinema, the pilot’s beach volleyball game, set to Kenny Loggins “Playin’ With The Boys.” Maverick puts his charges — including Miles Teller as “Rooster” Bradshaw, the son of Maverick’s deceased partner Goose — through a similarly oiled-up team building exercise, but it’s made slightly less homoerotic with the inclusion of “Phoenix” (Monica Barbaro).
This new generation of pilots have the rock-hard abs necessary for success, but Maverick is still the hottest pilot in the sky. Air combat has been a favorite subject filmmakers since Howard Hughes spent a fortune staging dogfights for Hell’s Angels. Scott’s Top Gun aerial combat scenes are rightfully revered to this day. Armed with a squadron of F-18s, compact digital cameras, and a wild disregard for Tom Cruise’s personal safety, Maverick’s aerial sequences are the most spectacular ever filmed.
Despite mustard-smeared corndog dialog and gaping plot holes, Maverick is extremely entertaining. Cruise’s charisma is undeniable, and the whole enterprise never tries to be more than what it is: slick propaganda for the military industrial complex. It’s been a winning formula since 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, and if the $801 billion we spend each year on sick toys like aircraft carriers means we can’t have nice things like health care, at least we get to watch the cool jets go vroom.