Tom Cruise in and as Top Gun: Maverick. Photo tweeted by @ParamountPics

Nearly four decades after the movie which propelled him to stardom, Tom Cruise returns to the cockpit to revitalise the American war machine, and the movie industry with it, in Top Gun: Maverick, a nostalgia-minded sequel that bests its predecessor by some distance.

The very first aerial sequence attests to its scale and ambitions. In the 1986 original, Cruise's hot-headed naval aviator Pete "Maverick" Mitchell is warned by the civilian instructor who takes his breath away, "You're not going to be happy unless you're going Mach 2 with your hair on fire." In the new movie, Maverick pushes his hypersonic aircraft past Mach 10 in willful defiance of the limits of his own body, and his admiral's orders. A classic Maverick move indeed in a legacy sequel loaded with call-backs.

The opening sequence is a dusk-lit montage of a naval crew prepping planes to take off and land on the tarmac of an aircraft carrier to the sounds of Kenny Loggins' Danger zone. Overcompensating callsigns abound: Cyclone, Hangman, Warlock, Payback, Coyote, etc. The product placement is present and accounted for: Maverick is still cruising around in a Kawasaki Ninja, with Aviators on and no helmet.

The flagship product being sold remains American exceptionalism. Only, the original was more obvious in its intentions. The cheesy catchphrases ("I feel the need, the need for speed"), the endless high-fiving in a game of shirtless beach volleyball, the red, white and blue title design, the poster of Cruise and co-star Kelly McGillis seated on a bike with stars and stripes in the background — all felt like it was selling war as a lifestyle, and no doubt gave many an American a patriotic hard-on.

The Cold War had moved into its final stretch when Top Gun came out in cinemas. In a 25-year anniversary piece for The Washington Post, David Sirota describes how many Americans were concerned about military readiness in the mid-'80s, and how the movie allayed their concerns. He writes, "Not only did enlistment spike when Top Gun was released, and not only did the Navy set up recruitment tables at theatres playing the movie, but polls soon showed rising confidence in the military."

Casting an attractive up-and-coming actor like Cruise to play an elite pilot who could take down Russian MiG-28s single-handedly and sleep with his instructor put a personable face to the American war machine. If Maverick challenged authority figures, it only made him more American, a non-conformist befitting his callsign.

Continuing the tradition, Top Gun: Maverick gives us a revamped recruitment commercial — and what a winning one at that. Director Joseph Kosinski brings some high-octane upgrades to the flight sequences, neutralises the excess macho energy with a Lady Gaga ballad, and builds an even grander stage in the air for his star to cruise around, making Top Gun: Maverick the most engaging articulation of the form.

The movie finds the Top Gun programme battling against obsolescence in the age of unmanned combat, but it still maintains an allure among the pilots due to its rigorous standards. Every military chief in both the movies is thus eager to point out the elite calibre of those selected for training, dealing in superlatives: "the best of the best," "the fastest man alive," etc. This kind of agitprop has become more and more common, even if it is often dressed up in pop cultural phenomena.

The Marvel movies, for instance, too share a symbiotic relationship with the US Department of Defence (DoD, or colloquially referred to as the Pentagon). The deal goes: in exchange for state-of-the-art hardware, location access and necessary inputs, the studios must make sure not to cast the military in an unfavourable light.

In a mindful effort at diplomacy, the Top Gun movies keep their antagonists nameless and faceless. If the original saw Maverick and his comrades engage in combat with six MiGs, the sequel sees them take on a couple of Su-57s. But neither the fighter model nor the nation is mentioned by name this time around.

It's the same reason the red, blue and white of the title design is now plain white. If Paramount wants Top Gun: Maverick to jet into cinemas across the world, they can't afford to piss any country off. (On a side note, the Taiwanese flag on Maverick's bomber jacket from the original had been replaced with vague symbols in the 2019 trailer to pander to the Chinese market — a move that drew sharp criticism, and was thus reversed.)

So the new movie follows Maverick training a new batch of recruits — yes, the best of the best — on an impossible mission: to fly at low altitude through a narrow canyon, infiltrate an "enemy" base, destroy a uranium enrichment plant secured by guided weapon systems, and get back to the US naval base. The uranium enrichment plant along with snowy conditions of the territory suggest the "enemy" could be North Korea. But that's irrelevant here.

Keeping the global box office and the widest possible audience demographic in mind, the makers behind Top Gun: Maverick also reckon with the creepy '80s behaviour that won't fly today. Courtship doesn't involve following a woman into the toilet. Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly), an admiral's daughter who was the faceless punchline of a joke in the original, is now a single mom and a love interest.

The sweat-dripping machismo is dried up a touch. At the same time, a sex scene is reduced to a chaste cutaway to keep pace with ever-changing attitudes in this era of sexless blockbusters.

In the 36 years between the original and the sequel, Cruise has risen from stardom to a myth of his own making. Top Gun: Maverick, like the recent Mission: Impossible movies, is thus as much a commercial about Tom Cruise exceptionalism as it is about American exceptionalism. For there is no denying he is one of a kind.

If he was happy looking pretty in Top Gun, his face here is contorted by the pressure of making steep climbs in his roaring Super Hornet against the full force of gravity. He isn't afraid to showcase some vulnerability and give his character a soul. When the action takes flight, swoops and pirouettes, it isn't just sound and fury signifying nothing.

Putting aside one's ego and guiding a crew to do likewise so they can work together to achieve something transcendent could be read as a subversive allegory for filmmaking itself. The Hollywood blockbuster model has been on autopilot for a while now with every studio following the Marvel template. It needed a maverick to raise the bar.

When Maverick bests every young recruit in a combat training sequence, there is a moment where he soars so high it feels like he could best Icarus too, fly into the sun and out, with his wings intact. It best sums up Cruise himself, our last action hero whose ego is writing cheques and willing his body into cashing them.

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