Top Gun: Maverick

When Joseph Kosinski set out to make Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, the goal wasn’t just another action entry — it was something sharper, stranger, and considerably more memorable. You can tell a lot about a movie from its tagline, and “Feel the need… The need for speed.” gives away the game in the best way.

At its core, the plot goes like this: After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell finds himself training a detachment of TOP GUN graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen. Tom Cruise takes the lead role and runs with it, while Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Bashir Salahuddin make sure the margins of the story stay just as alive.

Peel back the surface and Top Gun: Maverick is really interested in something bigger than its genre trappings. There’s a clear preoccupation with aircraft carrier here, and it’s paired with fighter pilot in a way that gives the whole thing more staying power than a plot summary suggests. You can also feel naval aviation and nuclear weapons working in the background, quietly shaping how later scenes land even when they’re not the explicit focus.

Labeled as action and drama, Top Gun: Maverick spends most of its runtime proving that genre tags are more like ingredients than instructions — Joseph Kosinski blends them into something that reads as its own thing rather than a checklist of conventions.

What Joseph Kosinski gets right here is restraint: knowing when to let a scene breathe and when to move on, a skill that separates competent action filmmaking from the kind people actually remember. It also helps that Jennifer Connelly, Bashir Salahuddin, Jon Hamm are given real material to work with; none of them feel like they’re just there to round out a call sheet.

The runtime, 131 minutes, is used efficiently — there’s very little fat on this one. Behind the scenes, Skydance Media, Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Paramount Pictures backed the production, giving Joseph Kosinski the resources to fully realize the vision. Made on a budget of $170,000,000, the film went on to earn $1,488,732,821 worldwide — a number that speaks for itself.

Fans of Joseph Kosinski’s other work will recognize the fingerprints immediately, but Top Gun: Maverick stands fine on its own even without that context. Love it or merely admire it, Top Gun: Maverick is hard to walk away from without an opinion — which, for an action film, is exactly the point. It’s a detail easy to miss on a first viewing of Top Gun: Maverick, but it rewards anyone paying close attention. That kind of craftsmanship is easy to take for granted until you watch a lesser film try the same thing and fail. Little touches like that are why the film keeps finding new defenders long after its initial release. It’s the sort of small decision that separates a good action film from a merely competent one. None of it feels accidental — Top Gun: Maverick is the product of choices made with real intention, and it plays that way from start to finish. That’s ultimately the difference between a film people watch once and one they keep coming back to, and Top Gun: Maverick lands closer to the latter.