Miles Teller has one request for Tom Cruise on Top Gun 3

Top Gun & the myth of Tom Cruise

In the pantheon of great Tom Cruise films, we can find the usual suspects. There's the Mission: Impossible series, of course, a franchise that redefined the way we experience action blockbusters. then there are the tentpoles -- Interview with the Vampire, Minority Report, The Last Samurai -- that cemented him as a box-office draw. And finally we have the critical darlings -- A Few Good Men, Born the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, Magnolia -- that confirmed he was more than just another pretty face. And then there's 1986's Top Gun.

Cruise was not an unknown when he first played Maverick -- indeed, the actor rose to prominence with the one-two punch of The Outsiders and Risky Business in 1983 -- but Top Gun marked a before-and-after point in his career. Cruise went from young and promising actor pre-Top Gun to hunky and bona fide movie star and legend in the making post-Top Gun. In other words, Top Gun took Tom Cruise and turned him into Tom Cruise.
Take our breath away

New Top Gun: Maverick featurette takes the actors to the sky

Do you feel the need? The need for speed? It's been nearly four decades since Top Gun drilled that catchphrase into our collective psyches. Later this week, Tom Cruise will reprise his role as Captain Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick. In the sequel, Maverick is training a new generation of Top Gun pilots, and he takes that duty seriously. Cruise also felt it was important to teach the new group of actors how to convincingly portray elite pilots. And as seen in a new featurette, Cruise insisted that the new performers learn how to fly for their roles.

As depicted in the video, the cast went through several months of training for the film. Perhaps the most harrowing part of that training was a simulated underwater evacuation. From there, the actors were taught how to fly their own planes in stages, and how to handle movement and spatial awareness inside the cockpit. However, Cruise and company took it a step further. Not only were the actors flying their planes, but they were also filming their in-cockpit footage for the movie. That's the kind of thing they don't teach you in film school!

Top Gun: Maverick review: Tom Cruise’s superior sequel

Faced with the cockiest flyboy in the history of naval aviation, Rear Adm. Chester "Hammer" Cain (Ed Harris) does not mince words. “Your kind is headed for extinction,” he tells the one and only Pete "Maverick" Mitchell. The admiral is talking about the obsolescence of fighter pilots in an age when bombs are dropped remotely from a strip mall outside Las Vegas. But he’s also speaking, in a metatextual manner, about the legend playing this legend: Hollywood’s aging but ageless golden boy Tom Cruise, pushing 60 but still climbing into cockpits  at a time when his “kind” — the movie star who’s a draw no matter the movie — has indeed been added to the endangered species list.

Those kind of winks are common in so-called legacy sequels, a very self-conscious strain of modern franchise continuation. Yet there’s scarcely a hint of irony in Top Gun: Maverick, a decades-later follow-up to one of the most anomalous hits of the 1980s. Early in the film, Cruise whips a tarp off that old motorcycle, the one he rode around back in ’86, and the moment is so glowingly awestruck, you half expect it to be accompanied by a 21-gun salute. This is a movie deeply in love with its title character, and with the movie star reprising that role, and maybe even with the fantasy of America it’s reviving.