THE NOSTALGIA
Rooster (Miles Teller) impresses Phoenix (Monica Barbaro) with his ‘Great Balls Of Fire’;
“YOU WERE A TOP GUN INSTRUCTOR BEFORE.”
Legacy sequels can often descend into a cynical exercise in You Liked That First Time Around So Here It Is Again box-ticking. One of the miracles of Top Gun: Maverick is how Kosinski and his team managed to nod to the original, sometimes blatantly, without ever seeming like they were running through a checklist. Some of those nods — the American football game, instead of a volleyball game; the opening credits exactly mirroring the original’s — were always planned. Some of them, such as Maverick’s reaction to hearing Rooster play ‘Great Balls Of Fire’, the song Goose sang in the first movie, came later.