Enjoy Benjamin P.'s interview with Glen Powell and Greg Tarzan Davis about Top Gun: Maverick
18Enjoy Benjamin P.'s interview with Glen Powell and Greg Tarzan Davis about Top Gun: Maverick. Glen Powell hails from Austin, Texas and is known for his performances in Hidden Figures, Everybody Wants Some! and The Expandables 3. Greg Tarzan Davis is a New Orleans native who made his film debut in The Call of the Wild. He also has a recurring role on Good Trouble and guest stars on Chicago P.D. and All Rise. Today, we are talking about their roles in Top Gun: Maverick, releasing in theaters May 27, 2022.
Top Gun: Maverick is nothing short of a miracle. This sequel to a movie from three decades ago is head and shoulders above its predecessors in sheer cinematic immersion and thematically has more on its mind: Legacy, family, love, loss, the ultimate costs of living like a maverick.
Top Gun: Maverick finds Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell (Tom Cruise) still living for the thrill of the flight, carrying the weight of a program that stands on the brink of being decommissioned with his daring unwillingness to be rendered extinct. Even as the very thing he loves doing puts him at risk every time he buckles into the cockpit, he hasn’t done anything else in the years since we last saw him. He’s sent back to Top Gun as an instructor by old pal Admiral ‘Iceman’ Kazansky (Val Kilmer), but his function is to teach pilots who’ve graduated the program to carry out a mission that forces to them use what they know and everything Maverick is there to teach them. There, he reignites a romance with an old flame (Jennifer Connolly) and reckons with the death of his best friend Goose by teaching his son Rooster (Miles Teller).
Top Gun: Maverick’s highs are rooted in the sensory experience of watching this movie. This isn’t a movie you watch, this is a movie that happens to you. Its technology and narrative are in harmony. Without the vision behind the way these flight sequences were brought to the screen, this movie wouldn’t be as compelling as it is. You’ll feel like your seat becomes the cockpit of an F-18. It’s that closeness we have to the pilots that makes all the in-flight action all the more engaging. You feel every dive, every turn, every maneuver because director Joseph Kosinski’s camera puts you right there. And the story on the ground is unexpected and moving. In what can sometimes feel like a deja-vu fest of direct callbacks to the original, and it works: Top Gun: Maverick uses that quality to its advantage. Maverick feels those same pangs of familiarity. We see him standing at a bar, watching his students size each other up, hoping to figure out the pilot hierarchy, knowing that decades before, he was doing the same thing as they are. He’s stuck in these cycles of his own making. And by being asked back to Top Gun, he finds another. Ultimately, Maverick lives for the flying, but not its accompanying sacrifices, and in this film he has too much in his life to lose it all. How they made Maverick such a richly-textured figure of regret and the promise of second chances is exciting to see.
The lesson of Top Gun: Maverick is to not be afraid to forgive and grow. Maverick stands on the precipice of true closure, but it’s his own pride and unwillingness to try that keeps him from patching up his fraught relationship with Rooster. Maverick can’t rectify his past until he puts pettiness aside and work to earn Goose’s forgiveness.
I give Top Gun: Maverick 5 out of 5 stars and can’t recommend it enough. And I give It an age rating of 10 to 18, plus adults, for some foul language and tense moments of aerial combat. The rumble of an F-18 engine complemented by the thawing of estranged bonds and the warmth of seeing old friends. That is the magic of Top Gun: Maverick—it flies into theaters May 27, 2022.
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