This week sees the release of Top Gun: Maverick. The film is the sequel to the highest grossing film of 1986 –Top Gun. Despite being so successful for many years it seemed that it would be a film that would exist in solitary. However, as the years progressed and Top Gun consistently grew, its fandom’s thoughts turned to a return to the world of Naval aviators.
Several years in the making, with a further couple of year delay due to the pandemic, the sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, finally arrives in UK cinemas this week. Early reviews (including ours) have highly praised the film, commending the aerial cinematography and the respect paid to the original. Some have even boldly claimed it to be better than the 1986 classic. This got us thinking about other great sequels…
Aliens
As amazing sequels go, you don’t get much better than Aliens.Only James Cameron’s third feature film, Aliens is science-fiction action perfection. Following in the footsteps of Ridley Scott was a massive task, Scott’s 1979 movie took cinema by storm with its haunted house in space set-up and traumatic dinner scene. No one knew how to follow it, no one except Cameron. The idea for Aliens came to him whilst he was working on the script for another sequel – Rambo: First Blood Part II, as he opted to shift from hunt and hide to all-out war. Scott’s skin crawling tension induced anxiety was replaced by super charged terror scorched adrenaline. It wasn’t all mindless action though as Cameron gave lead character Ellen Ripley something she had been lacking in Alien, a backstory. As much as Aliens is remembered for its ragtag gang of colonial marines doing battle with hordes of xenomorphs, it’s actually a wonderfully layered character study. Over the course of its run-time, Ripley Aliens explores trauma, survivor’s guilt, motherhood (in all its forms), and resilience. The performance rightfully earned Sigourney Weaver an Academy Award nomination in a genre that barely gets a look in outside of technical awards. Sadly, she didn’t win, but this committed performance and Cameron’s sizzling script are what have helped the film stand the test of time.
Terminator 2
Not content to create just one of the greatest sequels of all time, James Cameron had to do two. His low-budget indie tech-noir The Terminator is a stone-cold classic. Whereas he changed the formula of Alien and Aliens, in Terminator 2 he achieved something even more impressive, he made the brutal unflinching killer of the first film a strong, occasionally comedic, father figure and hero to the saviour of humanity, John Connor. The switch-around has inspired hundreds of copycats, but none manage it as well as Cameron who coupled the twist with one of the best summer action films of all time. As with Aliens, Cameron ensured that Terminator 2 had plenty of emotional weight to it, picking up with the original’s damsel in distress Sarah Connor. This Sarah is almost unrecognisable from the waitress of the first; Linda Hamilton underwent a gruelling transformation to become the ultimate warrior mother. A strong woman she may be, Sarah is struggling with the knowledge of humanity’s destruction and these shades of light and dark again help to keep Terminator 2 as relevant today as it was when released. Cameron has another sequel due out later this year, Avatar: The Way of Water. Time will tell if he can achieve a hat trick.
The Dark Knight
The middle part of Christopher Nolan’s triple bill of Batman films, The Dark Knight, is an impressive feat of filmmaking. One would expect nothing less from the mind behind indie darling Memento, but even after Batman Begins proved Nolan could hold his own against the heavyweights, it was The Dark Knight that demonstrated how talented a storyteller he could be on a blockbuster scale. Where The Dark Knight rose above its predecessor was that it could get on with things. Batman Begins is very much an origin story, Nolan having to explain his Gotham, his Bruce Wayne, and of course, his iteration of Martha and Thomas Wayne’s demise. With everything now set-up Nolan could get down to business and the film is a masterstroke in thrills from the opening bank robbery to the final showdown. A key ingredient in the film’s success though is the performance of the late Heath Ledger as Joker. His performance garnered the Australian actor a well-deserved posthumous Academy Award and though many have tried since, no one has captured the same intensity and danger as his Joker. The Dark Knight reinvented both comic book stories and their sequels, proving that story progression could happen and moving away from the method of regurgitating the same formula over and over.
Fast Five
The action franchise that doesn’t seem able to die, it wasn’t until the fifth The Fast and the Furious film that it finally matched the original. The immediate follow-up to 2001’s The Fast and the Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, didn’t land well. The absence of Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto was glaringly apparent and no matter how hard Paul Walker tried, he couldn’t save it. The third cast both original leads aside and tried to reboot the series on an entirely new continent. When that didn’t work, they brought Walker and Diesel back, and whilst that got bums on seats, it still failed to ignite the box office. Still not deterred, the studio decided to make one last Fast film, enter Fast Five. Fast Five was a breath of fresh-air, tapping into the magic of the first whilst simultaneously jumping the shark for the first time. What makes it such a great sequel is that it threw out its playbook and just went all-out mental with the action pieces. With the added gravitas of Dwayne Johnson on the cast, Fast Five is pure unadulterated action adrenaline. The sequel injected a ton of life into the dying franchise, its decision to round-up fan favourites from the failed films connected everyone together and now eleven years later there have been a further five films (including a spin-off), with at least two more to come.
Top Gun: Maverick
Some might say that it’s a little early to include Top Gun: Maverick on a list of amazing sequels, but trust us, the film really is worthy of this accolade. It’s completely true what critics have been saying, Top Gun: Maverick is sure to be the hit sensation of the summer as well as being one of the best sequels ever created. Despite having a gap of over thirty years between films, Top Gun: Maverick hasn’t lost any of the sparkle that made Top Gun magic. Joseph Kosinski’s sequel pays the perfect amount of respect and nostalgia to the original, whilst expanding upon the lore and opening up the legacy. For fans of Top Gun, everything that you adored about the original has been preserved and represented in some way. Our current movie climate is heavy on the nostalgia train, but whilst others pay endless fan service, Top Gun: Maverick respects what they love whilst moving things on in interesting ways. For example, whereas the plot in the original was wishy-washy at best, included purely as a means to link flight sequences together, there’s a more engaging narrative this time, one tinged with grief, making it emotional enough that it even reduced our reviewer to tears several times. Importantly, this expansion and development of the plot hasn’t taken time away from the air and the aerial scenes are stunning and really do need to be experienced in IMAX. Fast forward ten years and I guarantee that Top Gun: Maverick will be a regular contender in discussions about perfect sequels, so get to the cinemas now and rekindle that loving feeling.
Top Gun: Maverick is released in UK cinemas from Wednesday 25th May 2022.
