36 years ago, Tom Cruise became a teenage superstar with the role of sun-glassed, leather-jacketed, motorbike, perpetually pubescent, and testosterone-soaked fighter pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. Worldwide and, of course, also in Germany, at least in the West: The dashing American quickly became a popular cover and poster boy for Bravo, which had been inevitable for decades – even though the youth magazine surprisingly never gave him a star cut. Doesn’t matter!
“Top Gun – They fear neither death nor devil” was the name of the action-packed and explosive commercial for cold warriors with hot hearts, which was extensively sponsored by the US Department of Defense. This Wednesday, the sequel “Top Gun: Maverick” is finally coming to cinemas after years of delay due to corona. It is an exact copy of the original, namely a mental and nerve-racking concoction with an unsurpassed entertainment value, especially since it is popcorn-packed. So the wait was worth it.
How Tom Cruise Became Top Gun Maverick: A Whole Guy
And at the heart of the action, Tom Cruise rises as the new movie savior. A very special resurrection: In order for everything to remain the same, the man had to become a completely different person. This is perhaps the real story of Top Gun with all its other madness. Because since the cinema coup of 1986, Cruise, who appears here almost like a mama’s boy spoiled milk beard, has done everything to shape his real life, i.e. his public appearance, according to Maverick’s example.
However, Cruise had to fight his way through a number of film roles, from the auteur cinema-like “Born on the 4th of July” and “Eyes Wide Shut” to the “Mission Impossible”-schmonzes, he had to win the “Golden Raspberry” twice and had to work his way through several at Scientology Raising thetan ranks to invincibility, going through some marriages and many affairs, most embarrassing as hormone-driven love vows secrete on talk shows, as a skydiver, helicopter pilot or astronaut defying gravity…
Just the whole toxic maverick man botch. Seen in this way, “Top Gun” represents the beginning and end of a career: only now have the real Cruise and the fictional Maverick become one, and with it the irritating credibility gaps of the original have disappeared. In short, Tom Cruise’s “Mission Impossible” was always the unconditional authenticity, he always wanted to force the fictional and the real together. And had to be 59 years old to end up as a youthful hothead with this project. As a man and military, as a soldier.