Top Gun: Maverick – Why Tom Cruise’s latest thrill ride is a take-off of traditional Hollywood flying movies

As ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this week, Geoffrey Macnab looks back at fighter jet films, and says if it hadn’t been for directors like Howard Hawks and Howard Hughes who reached for the sky before him, Cruise’s Top Gun films would never even have left the ground

Tom Cruise reprises his 1986 role as reckless pilot Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ (Paramount Pictures)

When Tom Cruise was in Cannes this week for the premiere of Top Gun: Maverick, fans reacted as if his new film was groundbreaking and he was the first movie star ever to climb inside a cockpit.

In fact, he is building on the legacy of a century of flying movies. In 1939, Howard Hawks’s high-testosterone flying drama Only Angels Have Wings was chosen for the very first Cannes Film Festival, but Hitler intervened. The festival was cancelled as the war started. Flash-forward and Cannes has been making a very big fuss over Cruise and Top Gun: Maverick instead, as if to make up for not being able to show Hawks’s film all those years ago.

InTop Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski, the evergreen star reprises his role from the 1986 Top Gun movie as reckless pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. It was greeted with rave reviews at press screenings in advance of its Cannes premiere. “A thrill ride”, “Cruise’s best film”, and “the most fun you’ll have in cinemas this year” have been some of the verdicts.

A giant Top Gun installation sits halfway along the Croisette, the main seafront thoroughfare in Cannes, with a huge model of Cruise’s helmet and a screen playing footage of the film’s dogfights on a permanent loop.

There is nothing unusual in the world’s biggest movie names turning up in force in Cannes and preening themselves on the red carpet. Cruise last attended Cannes three decades ago when Far and Away played on the closing night of the 1992 edition.

What is different about Top Gun: Maverick, though, is that it has been given a slot in the official selection, alongside the films by all those revered arthouse auteurs that the festival loves to celebrate. “That’s also what we want to recognise: not just that he’s a star, but he’s a star who makes good cinema,” festival director Thierry Fremaux explained about why a veteran matinee idol like Cruise is being feted by the festival in quite such extravagant fashion.

The Paramount publicists have been doing their best to convince audiences that this isn’t just another CGI-driven summer blockbuster full of special effects. Its actors are performing all those madcap aerial stunts for real.

“Listen, this is not your typical acting job. You’re going to be in Super Hornets flying at 600 miles an hour, pulling heavy Gs. Are you comfortable with flying?” the director Kosinski asked cast members when they auditioned for their roles as the young pilots.

Cruise and producer Jerry Bruckheimer persuaded Vice Admiral DeWolfe H Miller III, the then commander of naval air forces, US Pacific fleet – aka “the Air Boss” – to support the film. The filmmakers were therefore allowed to use real-life F/A-18 supersonic combat jets.

The budget of the film was over $150m. See it on an IMAX screen and it makes for a pulsating spectacle. The story has barely started when Cruise takes out a jet on a rogue training flight to prove to the naval authorities that a human can still outperform a drone. He pushes the plane to the limits while driving himself to the extremes of human endurance.

Cary Grant as the pilot Geoff Carter in ‘Only Angels Have Wings’ (1939) (Moviestore/Shutterstock)

What the new Top Gun isn’t, though, is original. One reason why the film resonates so strongly is that it is following in exactly the same flight path as all those other airborne Hollywood movies which have come before it. From William Wellman’s silent epic Wings (1927), one of the first films to deal with aerial conflict, and Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels (1930) to Hawks’s The Dawn Patrol (1930) and John Guillermin’s The Blue Max (1966), there have been many other examples of Hollywood taking to the air.

These films have a poetical dimension you don’t find in conventional earthbound war movies. Their protagonists are young and courageous, performing their own ethereal, Icarus-like dances with death. They’re fighting as much against the elements as against their enemies. Between missions, they drink and have romances. They never mention the risks they face or the existential terror they feel when they take off. There is both camaraderie and extreme competition between them.

Directors making flying films tend to be as reckless as the pilots whose stories they tell. They go to extreme lengths to capture the most realistic aerial dogfights and outrageous flying exercises.

It’s instructive to watch Wellman’s Wings, which is now almost 100 years old. It has many of the same plot devices and character types that are found in the Top Gun films. Rather than Cruise and Val Kilmer as Maverick and Iceman, Wings offers Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Richard Arlen as the pals and rivals who become ace pilots. The actors were expert fliers. Clara Bow, the so-called “It Girl”, is the woman with a strong attachment to both men. The planes look old-fashioned by comparison with the sleek jets that Cruise straps himself into. Wings, though, offers exactly the same blend of machismo, boys’ own high jinks, and pathos found in the two Cruise movies. 

Charles Rogers, Clara Bow, and Richard Arlen in William Wellman’s ‘Wings’ (1927) – a silent film set in the First World War (Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock)

It has a very eerie early scene, in which the young protagonists meet a slightly more experienced colleague, Cadet White (Gary Cooper), who scorns the idea of carrying lucky mascots in the cockpit. “Luck or no luck, when your time comes to you, you are going to get it,” he tells them as he leaves the tent. Moments later, he dies in a crash. His possessions are gathered up. No one mentions him again.

“I just can’t go on killing nice kids like that,” Dutchy (Sig Ruman) laments early on in Only Angels Have Wings after yet another young pilot has been killed. The film is unusual in that it’s not a war movie. It’s set in the fictional South American port town of Barranca. Dutchy, the owner of Barranca Airways, is employing the young pilots to fly everything from mailbags to nitroglycerine. They’re using rickety old planes and have to cope with tropical storms and lethal, mountainous terrain.

The film has more in common with Top Gun than you might imagine. Instead of Cruise’s Maverick, its main character is the equally courageous and seemingly deeply cynical Geoff (Cary Grant), in charge of the airline business and also by far its best pilot. The film begins in a very strange fashion with Joe (Noah Beery Jr) trying to chat up Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), a nightclub performer passing through town. One moment they’re talking about having a steak dinner together, the next Joe’s body is being pulled out of the wreckage of his plane after a crash. Whatever grief or remorse they feel, the other pilots hide it. Twenty minutes after his death, Joe is seemingly erased from their memories. They drink and sing in the bar, behaving as if he never existed. They know that if they gave into their real feelings, they simply wouldn’t be able to function.

There is a similar dynamic in the new Top Gun movie. Maverick is still haunted by the death of his old wingman Nick “Goose” Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards) in the first film, but, like Grant’s Geoff, he keeps his feelings buttoned up. This leads to huge tensions between him and one of the young pilots he is training, Lieutenant Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), who is Goose’s son.

Cruise in the 1986 film ‘Top Gun’ which he starred with Kelly McGillis (Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Only Angels Have Wings has a camp and even comic undertow. The bravado is so exaggerated that it becomes hard to take seriously. Grant’s character dresses in a gaucho outfit complete with a broad-brimmed hat that makes him look more like Rudolph Valentino than a conventional action hero.

Nonetheless, like all of Hawks’s flying movies, this must have been a very painful story for the director to tell. His younger brother Kenneth had served in the US airforce during the First World War before coming to Hollywood to pursue a career in the movies. In early 1930, he was killed alongside several other crew members after a mid-air collision while filming aerial stunts for his new film Such Men Are Dangerous (1930).

Hawks began principal photography on his First World War flying movie The Dawn Patrol barely a month after his brother’s death.

“Always closer to Kenneth than to anyone else, Howard was unquestionably as affected by his brother’s death as by any other event in his life,” wrote the author Todd McCarthy in his biography of Hawks. “Already prematurely greying at thirty-three, his hair turned entirely grey thereafter. Publicly, however, he kept his own counsel, never even speaking about Kenneth to his wives and children.”

Ben Lyon and Jean Harlow in Howard Hughes’s ‘Hell’s Angels’ (1930) which follows two brothers who are both members of the British Royal Flying Corps during the First World War (United Artists/Kobal/Shutterstock)

The director, then, was very like both Grant’s Geoff and Cruise’s Maverick. He buried his own feelings.

There is a lot of suppressed emotion in Top Gun: Maverick. Cruise’s daredevil antics are partly his way of distracting himself from the grief and regret gnawing away inside him.

The jets may be faster in the new Top Gun film but every feint and manoeuvre, both in the sky and in the storytelling, has been performed before. If it hadn’t been for Hawks, Hughes and all those other filmmakers who reached for the sky before him, Cruise’s Top Gun films would never even have left the ground.

‘Top Gun Maverick’ is released on 27 May. ‘Wings’ and ‘Only Angels Have Wings’ are available on Amazon Prime