It’s in the G’s. Why Top Gun: Maverick Makes Your Heart Race

Top Gun: Maverick

Studio: Paramount Pictures, Skydance Media, Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Producers

Director: Joseph Kosinski

Release date: May 27, 2022

Starring: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Val Kilmer, Jennifer Connelly, Glen Powell, Monica Barbaro, Jon Hamm, Ed Harris

Run time: 2 hours, 10 minutes

Shot in Dolby and IMAX

You know you’re sitting in a red faux leather recliner in a movie theater.

So why does it feel like you’re in your driver’s seat on the front straight waiting for the course marshall to signal the pace car? When you see carrier personnel grabbing cables to make way for rolling wheels and signaling the go-ahead, why do you reach for the buckle on your five point harness? When fighter jet engines wind up and turn to golden flame, why does your right foot reflexively push an invisible accelerator all the way to the floor?

 This Top Gun: Maverick review speaks directly to you, who may never have flown a plane, but feel it nevertheless—the Need for Speed. If you haven’t seen this movie yet, go while it’s still in a real-live theater, where the engine sounds fill more than your ears and the runway disappearing beneath your wheels takes your breath away. And forget the popcorn. You’ll be holding onto your seat.

Like the first Top Gun, this movie is about fighter pilots. Yes, for some folks it might make a greater statement about bold youth and even how not to age out of a career you love, but that’s not what it’s about for those of us who’ve raced. It’s the pilots. They are brilliant, arrogant, daring, skilled and fast. Very fast. So fast that they don’t measure their speed in miles or knots. They measure it in G-forces, which not only reflect speed, but the ability to maneuver through it.

The fastest plane in the movie, Darkstar, is purported to be able to tolerate 10 G’s, or 10 times the speed of sound, equivalent to more than 7000 mph. Racers don’t have to go that fast to know what G’s feel like—the pressure against your belts when you tromp on the brakes going into a corner, the way your body tenses to maintain control when you’re weaving in and out of traffic at top speed, or how you’re thrown around in the cockpit when your tires break loose and you’re chasing your own rear end, doing unplanned donuts in the middle of the track.

Top Gun:Maverick takes special care to keep true to the physics of G-forces and the toll they take on a pilot’s body to the point of blackouts. Drivers feel the same G’s when things go bad.

Just ask the driver of the pink Spec Miata who, on June 18 at the SCCA Road America June Sprints, hit the stopped car ahead of him on the first lap, flew at least 6 feet in the air, pulling more than 8 G’s in the process, and fractured 14 vertebrae. This movie makes you feel every bit of the same physical stress when the pilots’ bodies distort and they struggle to stay conscious.

How did they do it? How did they make you feel right there? That, friends, is good cinematography and, in the case of Top Gun:Maverick, Claudio Miranda accomplished a lot of the adrenaline production through closeups–so close and so often that about half way through, I realized I knew the color of every star’s eyes.

Yes, there are aerobatics, but so much of the action is portrayed up close that I could feel my hands on the stick, my feet on the pedals, and the sweat gathering under my helmet.

Under power, flying nose to tail at top speed, Miranda’s crew didn’t shoot the hypersonic parade from an observer’s standpoint but from a pilots’ and when Maverick’s fighter hurtles up between unsuspecting students, it felt as immediate as when a competitor breaks out of his hiding place in my blind spot and blasts by.

Most people already know that Tom Cruise does his own stunts and he flew the F18, too. Actual Navy pilots flew the fancy parts, but Cruise wasn’t the only actor/passenger.

Every actor who played a pilot actually had to fly in an F18, not just pretend they did. Director Joseph Kosinski admitted that a number of them threw up in the process. It’s important to acknowledge this because more than physics is going on here.

The process begins before you ever leave the ground or paddock. It’s knowing firsthand the build of anticipation when you fill fuel, remove wheel chocks, and run a slow hand over the metal skin, knowing what’s hiding underneath. Under way, there’s the pressure and wheeze of rushing air, and the moment your head knocks back and your gut retreats into the seat bottom as you hit the gas.

It’s when the cockpit starts to shake and you beg, “Just a little more…”  After all, you never know how far you can go until you go too far, just like the pilots. These moviemakers recreated all of it, not from the outside, but from the inside. Their actors experienced what they portrayed. Almost no CG was used. It felt real because it was real.

There is one substantial difference, though, that stems from driving a race car for fun and flying an F18 for the Navy.

Although every racetrack has a coffin corner of sorts where no one can make a mistake if everyone is to go home safe and unbent at the end of the day, that danger doesn’t usually involve death.  The theme of danger, real danger, weaves its way in and out of this story, from reliving Goose’s Top Gun death to Maverick’s strict caution to his cocky students that when they make a mistake, they’d better be ready to explain what happened to their wing man’s family at his funeral.

Death, of course, is the ultimate loss. There’s another loss, though, that pilots and drivers alike experience, the one of coming in last. For all of us, the day comes when we know, like Maverick, that no matter how hard we try, we’re not going to be able to outrun an opponent, but just don’t know how to give up.

And then, sometimes, the tide turns. This movie reminds me of how it feels when, just at the last minute, the car in front of me brakes a little too soon and I can slip by underneath and take off into clear air, cheating loss with grit.

“It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot” that wins, they say.  So, when you’re considering whether to spend a bit of your racing budget at the movies, take Maverick’s advice: “Don’t think. Just do.”