The enemy they’re going up against has not just been left unnamed, as they were in the 1986 Top Gun, but deliberately unparsable, with a combination of qualities that can’t be mapped onto any existing nation. The slew of fresh young flyers are tauter-skinned and more diverse and less prone to using unnecessary punctuation in their texts than Maverick, but of course are still nowhere near as skilled. The logic of this scenario - Maverick is, by any account, a terrible member of the military, no matter his talents - is as spongy as everything that follows. There is, as my colleague Bilge Ebiri observed, something haunting and unreal and stubbornly dreamlike about the sun-soaked world of Top Gun: Maverick, which hinges on the unlikely summoning of Cruise’s renegade flyboy Pete “Maverick” Mitchell back to San Diego to prepare a new generation of pilots for a mission so ridiculously difficult that he’s the only one who can conceive of a way of accomplishing it. I am arguing this not as one of those acts of fan theorizing that pops up on Reddit from time to time - you know, that Ferris Bueller is actually a figment of Cameron’s fevered mind, or that Marsellus Wallace’s soul is contained in that suitcase kicking around in Pulp Fiction - but as the only way to really make sense of the movie. Tom Cruise’s character dies at the start of Top Gun: Maverick.
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