After more than 30 years, we're finally getting a sequel to Top Gun, and what's even more shocking is that the film won't replace the actual fighter jet action with CGI. We're getting Tom Cruise and company back in the air to film the flying scenes for Top Gun: Maverick and while doing so has been reportedly a tough experience, it seems it's likely also been worth it.
But Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise and he seems to always be looking for ways the up the ante and do things on screen he's never done before. Since the actor had already been inside the jets for the first Top Gun, we could be sure he would go and find a way to do something in them that had never done before. As it happens, it seems the new Top Gun will show off a few things we didn't see the first time around, including some scenes the production needed to get Naval permission to pull off. As director Joseph Kosinski explains to EW...
For the sequence where Tom got to do some extreme low-altitude flying in this film, we had to get special permission from the Navy to do it. It was one of the most extreme aerial sequences that we could come up with. Also, getting to do a real launch off a carrier and a real landing on a carrier — no one else has been able to ever do that in a movie before. Tom got to fulfill every kind of aviation dream that he had.
Based on Joseph Kosinski's comments, Top Gun: Maverick actually went looking for extreme aerial sequence ideas to put in the film, and extreme low altitude flying was what they hit upon. Doing such things required military approval, one assumes because the lower you're flying, the more likely you might come across civilian obstacles. The movie also filmed the actual launch and landing of the jets, which apparently had never been done before, marking a pair of first for Top Gun: Maverick.
The new film will see Tom Cruise's Pete "Maverick" Mitchell paired with a group of young flyers. One of which, is the son of Maverick's former friend and Rio, Goose.
It's awesome to hear that we're going to be getting such impressive aerial work in the new film. It's not exactly shocking that Top Gun: Maverick is going to have great fighter jet action, that's sort of the point of the entire thing, but we'll actually see some stuff we've never seen in a Hollywood movie before. If you're going to make fans wait this long for a sequel, you'd better give them something worth waiting for.
It's still more than a little surreal that we're actually getting a Top Gun sequel. We'll all get to reenter the Danger Zone June 26.
