Takes on Top Gun's 'legacy sequel' have largely revolved around its core engines of nostalgia and nationalism, incarnated in Tom Cruise: one of the 'last true movie stars', doggedly refusing to shuffle out of the cockpit. Critics moan that the villains buttressing such 'Murricana triumphalism lag behind the new geopolitical order but from another perspective, its roaring box office success speaks to a new, internationalist era of 'muscular masculinity" fantasy.

Top Gun , both past and present, nails a pretty basic range of dramatic beats: planes go fast. Short man has authority issues. And, most importantly: locker room gets pretty freaking homoerotic. In fairness, that latter attribute- arguably the original film’s most memorable characteristic, underlying, or, perhaps, co-constituting its spectacular degree of jingostic camp- has melted down a little in the unforgiving glare of the 2020s. The original film issued from canny producer Jerry Bruckheimer: architect of that other toddly progressive WASPy cultural tentpole, Pirates of the Caribbean, here demonstrating a clear eye for morally shaded, unapologetically horny cultural origin stories rooted not in some sappy emotionalist history, but one thing only- the need for speed.

Now. Despite the rising, raw-sewage tide of discourse on the implications of an allegedly toothless ‘military industrial entertainment complex’ propaganda number- factory-farmed by a draconian Scientologist method-ish actor, within fumbling distance of an OAP’s London Freedom pass by now- the film’s untrammeled box office success may have something to do with these very facts, in a more positive sense.

Critics and audiences alike inevitably gravitate to Cruise as the centre of attention: an arresting exception to the tidal wave of ‘legacy sequels’, or indeed live action remakes, of ante-internet staples with a recast protagonist (in the case of Indiana Jones and the Star Wars franchise) or an entirely new lineup (any of Disney’s innumerable CGI musical reboots). Welcome as Beyonce may be in the Lion King, Cruise is the crown jewel in a film recast with a smidgen less mayonnaise in the ensemble; the role of Maverick launched this toothy Brobdingnagian to popular adulation- he inhabits (nay, possesses) the character to a special degree. Cruise’s schtick- including the cultish ‘Top Gun training camp’ to which he subjected his cast- speaks to an oddly apolitical ideal of ‘muscular masculinity’, which has allowed the Top Gun films to overcome the propagandist hostilities that dog conventional military movies.

Instead, the sequel shows off the age-defying geriatric teflon Cruise, like some botoxed, fillered wrinkle free, muscle-bound rich guy android with all the good toys at his beck and call- and he’s sharing them round. His old crony, Val Kilmer’s Iceman ,makes a return calibrated for maximum extraction of ‘bro tears’, in defiance of the throat cancer that took his natural voice. From Miles Teller to a middle aged Jon Hamm- age poses no barrier to guys who want to buckle up for a much vaunted taste of the ‘G’s’ .More vulnerable to the brutal forces of Hollywood physics are the women of the original movie: romantic lead Kelly McGillis and Meg Ryan are ejected and replaced by Jennifer Connelly and Monica Barbaro.

Tom Cruise, superhuman in his sixth decade, is, in the military industrial entertainment complex what one might hope for in a 79 year old aviator and bomber jacket wearing President and Commander-in-Chief, a fantasy that a mirage of impressive technology, advanced equipment, and soldiers’ bodies on display can prove the authenticity of American military power and superiority. Dispensing of boring, stodgy technological or political realism, Maverick reasserts a slyly beguiling defense of old school American imperialism, stripped of the gruesome, unglamorous foibles of real-life interventions since the ‘86 original- but at least it’s fun and oh, so gay.