Tom Cruise's latest mission: Restoring the all-American summer blockbuster season with 'Top Gun'

Gotta hand it to Tom Cruise: the man understands value.

“Top Gun: Maverick,” his new and long-awaited sequel to the 1986 blockbuster that launched Cruise even higher into the stratosphere, was slated to be released in the summer of 2020. Well, we all know what happened there: the COVID-19 pandemic came along and shut down movie theaters all across the land.

That’s when Hollywood’s model for releasing films changed, perhaps for good. Audiences no longer needed to wait for lots of movies to come soon to a theater near them. Instead, they could just stream them on their mega-sized flat-screen TVs at home.

That was a thrill at first and often still is. At home in March of 2020, my wife Valerie and I watched a basketball film starring Ben Affleck that had just been released in theaters a mere three weeks earlier. As someone who remembers the pre-VCR days of waiting for big movies to finally play at the second-run theater in my neighborhood, this felt like a whole new world – a rare silver lining to the pandemic, though not anything to ease the fears that theaters were facing a virus-inflicted, existential threat.

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Anyway. If memory serves, “Top Gun: Maverick” got postponed twice more as the health crisis persisted. Rather than release the film on Paramount’s streaming service, either exclusively or in conjunction with a limited theatrical release, the studio – or, let’s face it, Tom Cruise, most likely – insisted on holding back the sequel until it could be shown where it belonged: on the big silver screen, and most preferably an IMAX one. In other words, Cruise and company understood the film’s value and refused to settle for less.

The decision worked: “Top Gun: Maverick” opened during the Memorial Day weekend and grossed an astonishing $160.5 million. Now, I’ll grant you ticket prices have gone through the roof in the past 35 years, but still: the original “Top Gun” needed its entire theatrical run in 1986 to make that kind of cash.

And here’s the good news: the sequel is fantastic, superior to the original in every single way. Truth be told, I did not care much for the original “Top Gun,” then and now. But that does not change the fact that this new film is exciting and suspenseful and – this is a surprise – actually has some emotional heft. It’s not a four-star film, and it’s not likely to be ranked among the best movies of the year, and its Oscar nominations surely will be for its technical merits only, but no matter. This is an old-fashioned, all-American summer blockbuster in peak form.

And unless I am forgetting something, it’s also the first monster hit of the pandemic era that does not have a superhero in it. Thank God for that – I am all Marveled out, thank you very much.

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Valerie and I saw “Top Gun: Maverick” at the theater in Saco on Saturday. The theater was packed. I used to lament having to buy tickets online, but as Val and I headed to the theater on Saturday, I was glad to know that there were two seats there, waiting for us. I used to like being in long lines to see popular movies – standing and waiting to see the latest “Star Wars” or Indiana Jones film on a hot summer evening, for example, would give me the sense of being in the most exciting spot in the universe at that moment.

That’s the joy of going to see blockbusters, especially in the summertime: they are group events. Watching “Top Gun: Maverick,” I sensed a rapt attention in the audience and got caught up in it myself. And again, this is from a guy who had little use for the original “Top Gun.”

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Leave it to Tom Cruise to restore good ol’ fashioned summer blockbuster movie-going, not just to its pre-pandemic days but to an even earlier time. Others have said this elsewhere, so I’ll just add to the chorus: Cruise really is the last of his kind, the last 1980s movie star still standing.

Make what you will of his off-screen life, but on screen, Cruise is still getting it done. Few actors show his intensity and commitment to the movies they make. For quite a while there, it seemed as though Cruise was no longer challenging himself. Once, he had been a young actor who worked with legendary directors and stretched his acting skills in such films as “Rain Man,” “Born on the Fourth of July,” and, particularly, “Magnolia.” In his late forties and fifties, though, he seemed to be chasing the Fountain of Youth, starring almost exclusively in souped-up action films and sci-fi flicks.

But this new “Top Gun” movie shows this is not the case. In fact, the film casts a new light on his most recent “Mission Impossible” sequels, as well, as they are among the best action-adventure films of the past 50 years. It seems Cruise has shifted his focus, passion and his commitment – his mission, if you will. Perhaps one day, he will return to making movies like “Jerry Maguire” and “A Few Good Men,” but for now he is doing something equally of value.

Cruise is restoring the summer blockbuster, cutting through the barrage of superheroes and CGI effects and making top-notch crowd-pleasers that offer human stories, stunts without shortcuts, and actual sets and planes and cars and motorcycles and all that good stuff.

Sitting in the cinema on Saturday, watching “Top Gun: Maverick” and surveying the crowd, I felt something that I had not experienced in a while – something that I had feared the pandemic had destroyed for good.

I felt the magic of the movies again.

Shawn P. Sullivan is an award-winning columnist and is a reporter for the York County Coast Star. He can be reached at ssullivan@seacoastonline.com.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Tom Cruise's latest mission: Restoring the summer blockbuster season with 'Top Gun: Maverick'