‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Delights By Bringing Audiences Closer To The Heavens, Like ‘Wings’ And ‘Superman’ Before It

When Top Gun: Maverick was announced as a nominee for Best Picture at the 2023 Oscars, a shift in the film’s perception occurred almost instantaneously. It’s a strange phenomenon: Top Gun: Maverick was one of the most beloved movies of the year, grossing $1.2 billion worldwide, but after being nominated, it gets held to a different standard. It’s no longer enough to simply be an achievement in blockbuster filmmaking. “Sure, it’s a lot of fun,” you could hear its critics saying. “But Best Picture, really?” 

Yes, really. You can give it credit for saving movie theaters. You can revel in the joy of having a legitimate movie star anchoring a Hollywood blockbuster again, instead of a guy slathered in CGI. You can even acknowledge the high degree of creative achievement in making a sequel to a 36-year-old blockbuster that not only matches but surpasses the original, and none of that would explain why Top Gun: Maverick is worth a Best Picture nomination. All that, as they say, is what the money is for.

To be worthy of a nomination, a movie has to exhibit cinematic excellence, not just crowd-pleasing thrills. It should challenge viewers, or speak to something universal in the human condition — and there is little more universal than a dream of flying. It’s the most popular answer to, “What superpower would you like to have?” It’s a core, fundamental human fantasy hatched when early man looked to the sky and saw birds soaring above them. It’s a wish that we might glide rather than stumble. To live in the heavens rather than in these clumsy bodies.

And for almost as long as it has existed, cinema has been trying to grant us this wish. The first first film to win Best Picture (then called “Outstanding Picture”)  was 1927’s Wings, a WWI epic with gripping dogfight sequences that not only captured the terror of aerial warfare but also gave millions of viewers their first chance to experience the majesty of flight. The film’s success reflected the aviation mania that was sweeping America in the 1920s, when record-setting flights and high-speed air races garnered national interest. Wings famously captured the attention of millionaire Howard Hughes, who spent millions of his own dollars in his obsessive pursuit of capturing flight onscreen in his 1930 epic Hell’s Angels, which cost the life of at least two stunt pilots and nearly Hughes himself (he suffered a horrific crash when he insisted on flying one of the planes himself).

In more recent years, superhero movies have also given viewers a chance to fly, minus the sense of reality. 1978’s Superman pitches flight as transcendent romance, when the titular hero grabs Lois Lane by the hand and carries her through the night sky over Metropolis. There’s a tradition here of great flying sequences appearing during periods of transition in Hollywood. Wings and Hell’s Angels bookended the first talkies; within a few years, the spectacle of their aerial sequences would be out of fashion in favor of fast-talking screwball comedies. Superman, meanwhile, launched the industry out of New Hollywood and into the 1980s, when larger-than-life heroes and visual effects would rule.

Top Gun: Maverick arrives at a similar pivot point, with viewers just starting to yawn at superhero franchises driven by CGI battles. It offers something different, an earned spectacle built almost entirely on reality. On Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise and director Joseph Kosinski raised the bar for aerial sequences on film without losing sight of the ground. It features several standout flying sequences in which Cruise and his proteges play, slicing through the air with the power of a bullet and the grace of a hummingbird. In the first training scene, Maverick schools the kids on dogfighting, at one point flying upside down inches above another pilot just for kicks. It’s more of a dance than a fight, and it culminates in Maverick and Rooster (Miles Teller) twirling around each other like copulating eagles in a euphoric death spiral.

There’s the climactic mission featuring numerous impossible moves—swerving, climbing, corkscrewing, and evading—-not to mention the bravura opening sequence that finds Maverick breaking the airspeed record. He only flies straight in this one, but it’s filmed as if captured from space. There’s more ethereal beauty here, less physics. There’s also the final battle between Maverick and a nameless enemy in a next-generation fighter plane. This one sports perhaps the film’s most dazzling aerial maneuver, when their enemy’s plane stops on a dime in mid-air and floats in a gentle spin, while Maverick goes speeding past. “What the f-?” he exclaims, having never seen a plane do that before. Neither had we.

Credit Cruise for insisting the aerial sequences be accomplished as practically as possible, but director Joseph Kosinski and his team of brilliant craftspeople had the more challenging work of shooting and editing them so we can understand the complex choreography of their ballroom in the sky. For all its successes, the original Top Gun was mostly useless in this regard. Its aerial sequences are indecipherable and overly reliant on dialogue between the pilots to explain what’s happening. In their defense, aerial sequences are difficult. In the history of cinema, there have only been a handful that really impress.

Top Gun: Maverick impresses. It delights and amazes. To nominate it or (gasp) even award it Best Picture would be the only way to properly recognize a cast and crew, who invented new ways to amazes us. It would be a win for aerial coordinator Kevin LaRosa II, who designed his own aircraft mounted with a camera that can withstand 3 G’s. A win for a cast of young actors that underwent three months of dedicated flight training before shooting commenced, and had to not only act and try not to vomit during takes but also operate the onboard cameras themselves. 

It would be a win, of course, for Cruise, without whom none of this would have ever come to pass. And a win for Kosinski, who persuaded Cruise to make the film, oversaw one of the most unique productions in the history of cinema, and, among many other tasks, spent over a year persuading the Navy to let him install cameras in their planes. Just like in Wings and Hell’s Angels, it takes real, hard human effort to make flying look so effortless. Best Picture? That’s the least we could do.

Noah Gittell (@noahgittell) is a culture critic from Connecticut who loves alliteration. His work can be found at The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Ringer, Washington City Paper, LA Review of Books, and others.