Top Gun: Maverick 's four-quadrant audience reception is making it the new summer hit to beat with practically nothing but high praise from all who have seen it. Maverick sets up a high stakes mission that Tom Cruise's Pete "Maverick" Mitchell is training his Top Gun recruits for. The film' script, penned by Ehren Kruger, Christopher Macquarrie, and Eric Warren Singer, plays its cards extremely well in how it builds up to that mission.
Maverick and his recruits, who include the son of his old buddy Goose (Anthony Edwards) bearing the call sign Rooster (Miles Teller), must destroy a weapons system built by an unnamed enemy nation and hidden in a mountain base before it can be launched. Maverick devotes the bulk of its second act to the Mach-10 pushing pilot Maverick to take his team through the logistics of the mission, running multiple flight training scenarios, and getting them up to speed on all of the technical details necessary for success. This benefits Maverick's third act greatly, due to the audience being informed of everything right alongside the characters.
When Maverick and his young pilots finally embark on the mission, the movie doesn't have to devote any time to filling the audience in on what's happening, what needs to be carried out for the mission, or the sequence of events that have to occur for success. Maverick's entire middle section already breaks all of those details down, with the audience having seen the plan rehearsed and practiced in multiple training scenarios. That allows Maverick's aerial-based finale to really put the pedal to the metal when the climactic mission arrives, knowing that everything about the mission has been made crystal clear.
That's not to say that Maverick is simply a playthrough of war games in its second act. Maverick himself begins to wrestle with uncertainty, knowing that the mission is an extremely difficult one and the high possibility that he'll lose some or even all of his pilots. Still, Maverick streamlines its fast-paced storytelling very well, bringing in Maverick's old friend Iceman (Val Kilmer) for a heartwarming and confidence-building cameo at the right time without disrupting the flow of the story.
The ticking time-bomb plot and time-sensitive mission of Maverick made it necessary that the movie be burdened as little as possible in its final act with making sure the audience understands the landscape and individual steps of the aerial mission of Maverick and his team. The more Maverick had been required to do so as its team of courageous pilots were dodging enemy fire, the more its ability to maintain its tension and suspense would have decreased. That issue is, thankfully, virtually completely absent as soon as the planes take off.
Maverick has grown into a more conscientious and detail-oriented pilot from his past experiences, as the movie shows in how he guides his team for this mission. The film shares Maverick's mindset of preparedness being a virtue before entry onto the battlefield. Thanks to the movie's very meticulously assembled screenplay as a major contributor to its box office success, Top Gun: Maverick is able to soar right into the high-stakes mission of its final act and give its thrill-seeking audience what they came for without the need to pause for anything.
