Top Gun: Maverick Review

The craft argument is simple and total: those are real aircraft, those are the actors' real faces distorting under sustained G, and Claudio Miranda rigged six cameras inside F/A-18 cockpits to prove it. Nothing computer-generated has yet matched what that does to an audience's stomach, and Kosinski cuts the canyon run with the geography always clear, which is rarer in modern action than it should be. The dogfight staging respects distance, altitude, and fuel in a way that makes the final act legible as a problem rather than a montage.

Tom Cruise plays Maverick as a man whose only remaining currency is competence, and the Val Kilmer scene is handled with real grace and no wallowing. The screenplay is entirely formula: the briefing that sets impossible parameters, the rival who becomes an ally, the dead friend's son, the beach football. The dialogue exists to move pilots between briefings. But it executes that formula at a level of physical filmmaking almost nobody attempts now.