THE long-awaited blockbuster, Top Gun: Maverick, opens in cinemas nationwide on Friday.
Maverick stars Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Charles Parnell, Bashir Salahuddin, Monica Barbaro, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Greg Tarzan Davis with Ed Harris and Val Kilmer.
According to the plot, after more than 30 years of service as one of the navy’s top aviators, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise) is where he belongs - pushing the envelope as a courageous test pilot and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him.
When he finds himself training a detachment of Topgun graduates for a specialised mission, the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen, Maverick encounters Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw (Teller), call sign: “Rooster”. He is the son of Maverick’s late friend and Radar Intercept Officer, Lieutenant Nick Bradshaw, aka “Goose.”
Facing an uncertain future and confronting the ghosts of his past, Maverick is drawn into a confrontation with his own deepest fears, culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who will be chosen to fly it.
It is a sequel to a movie so iconic that it is still part of pop culture today, 36 years after it was first released.
United International Pictures - a joint venture of Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures that is distributing the film in South Africa - shared the movie’s production notes with POST. These include comments from the film’s creators and cast on the movie.
Cruise said: “Playing Maverick again, at a different stage of my life, has been an incredible experience for me. Maverick is still Maverick. He still wants to fly Mach 2 with his hair on fire. But you see the transition that Maverick undergoes. The pressure of him losing his best friend, the responsibility he feels about that and how he has carried that with him – and how that incident has changed both his and Rooster’s life forever. Maverick loves Rooster as a son. This film is about family, and it’s about friendship, and it’s about sacrifice. It’s about redemption and the cost of mistakes.”
Cruise returns as actor and producer in the new film.
“I’d thought about a sequel to Top Gun for all these years. People had asked for a sequel for decades. Decades. And the thing I said to the studio from the beginning was: ‘If I’m ever going to entertain this, we’re shooting everything practically. I’m in that F/A-18, period. So, we’re going to have to develop camera rigs. There’s going to be wind tunnels and engineering. It’s going to take a long, long time for me to figure it out.’
In the cockpit
Jerry Bruckheimer, one of the producers, said, in the original movie, that although Cruise was filmed in the cockpit of an F-14 Tomcat, his cast-mates were not so successful in their endeavours.
“We had other actors up there, flying, but their footage, unfortunately, wasn’t usable because they didn’t have enough experience in training. When we put them in the air, none of them could hack it. Tom was the only one we had usable flight footage for. This time, thanks to Tom, all the actors on Top Gun: Maverick became accustomed to the fundamentals and mechanics of flight and G-forces because of all the training they did months in advance.”
Cruise said: “What we have achieved with the aerial sequences is genuinely something that people will never have seen before. We’ve trained actors to be able to fly and perform in real F/A-18s. And to do that, we took the greatest fighter pilots in the world (from the US Navy), and we taught them about movies – the pilot and the actor had to work as a team. This is the sophistication of the aerial sequences. No one’s ever done this, ever. There is a majesty and beauty in flying an airplane. It’s both using and defying nature.”
Emotion
Commenting on how making this sequel felt, Cruise said: “It’s every emotion. Top Gun: Maverick is a legacy film for me. For us, me and Jerry. Making this movie has been a very emotional experience. When you ask me about that line, ‘It’s not what I am. It’s who I am’. It’s always been that way, in terms of my work, and my life and my passion.
“And to have started this with Tony (Scott, Top Gun director, who died in 2012.)… And for it now to be finished… And, also, just the responsibility for the audience, which I always feel. You know, it’s 36 years later. I knew we had the story. I knew it was in the palm of our hand. But the emotion of it? Man, making this movie has been everything you can imagine.”
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