After thirty-four years, Maverick will soon soar again thanks to the Top Gun sequel Top Gun: Maverick; however, fans of the franchise may be wondering what the sequel to '80s classic will look like, and how the movie's director will update it for contemporary audiences. While original Top Gun cast members Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer will be returning for this new installment, Top Gun: Maverick will be going forward without one key creative participant of the first Top Gun. Tony Scott, the director of the original Top Gun will not be directed Top Gun: Maverick due to his tragic suicide in 2012.
Tony Scott's absence means a new director needed to be called in for Top Gun: Maverick. That new director has turned out to be Joseph Kosinski. Kosinski is the filmmaker behind Tron: Legacy who has spent the last ten years as a director of multiple box office hits. He also recently scored the best reviews of his career with his 2017 directorial effort Only the Brave and is now poised to follow in the footsteps of Tron: Legacy by once again directing a sequel to a beloved 1980s property (in this case, Top Gun).
Though he's only directed three feature films, Joseph Kosinski's work as a filmmaker up to this point still features a high volume of recurring visual and thematic elements. Such fixtures of his works help to paint a portrait of what territory Top Gun: Maverick could potentially explore under the direction of Kosinski.
Tron: Legacy
For Tron: Legacy, his debut feature film directorial effort, Kosinski immediately established himself as a filmmaker capable of crafting truly memorable spectacle. While its characters and dialogue received mixed reviews from critics and audiences, the way Tron: Legacy created thrilling action sequences that could only happen in the world of Tron was widely acclaimed. Many of those action sequences, including a critical climactic duel, made heavy use of aerial combat, an element that will clearly prove crucial to Top Gun: Maverick and its barrage of sequences focused on fighter jets.
Another element of Tron: Legacy that's likely to reverberate through Top Gun: Maverick is its central fractured father/son dynamic. In Tron: Legacy, that dynamic emerges between Sam Flynn (Garret Hedlund) and his father Kevin Flynn. The latter individual vanished from Sam's life when he was a boy, creating resentment in adult Sam towards his father. Meanwhile, Top Gun: Maverick focuses on another character who lost their father then they were young, Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of the deceased Top Gun character Nick "Goose" Bradshaw. A protagonist grappling with a long-absent father was a critical component of Tron: Legacy and similar thematic territory is likely to be explored through the character of Rooster in Top Gun: Maverick.
Oblivion
Being a twist-heavy science-fiction story more akin to a Philip K. Dick short story than movies involving beach volleyball, Joseph Kosinski's 2013 directorial effort Oblivion, on the surface, doesn't seem to have many elements that could re-emerge in Top Gun: Maverick. However, it isn't devoid of aspects likely to return in Kosinski's next project. For one thing, like Tron: Legacy and the upcoming Top Gun sequel, Oblivion has a love for aerial chase and fight scenes. Meanwhile, the kinetic and careful direction Kosinski lent his debut directorial effort re-emerges in Oblivion. Kosinski is not an action director who relies heavily on shaky-cam and similarly murky visual elements for action scenes. Oblivion cements that he prefers to shoot action scenes in a visually-spacious manner that allows viewers a chance to soak in all the imagery on-screen. Steady wide shots are prominent in the set pieces in Kosinski blockbusters like Oblivion. Therefore, one should expect such a visual mainstay to return for Top Gun: Maverick.
However, the most critical element being carried over from Oblivion to Top Gun: Maverick is, of course, Tom Cruise. In recent years, Cruise has taken to almost exclusively working with a small group of directors (Christopher McQuarrie, Edward Zwick, Doug Liman) he's had prior experience with. Oblivion was Cruise's first collaboration with Kosinski and it seems to have cemented Kosinski into that aforementioned small circle of filmmakers modern-day Cruise works with. Their work together on Oblivion didn't receive especially notable marks from either critics or audiences, but perhaps the growing bond between Kosinski and Cruise results in a special actor/director dynamic for Top Gun: Maverick.
Only the Brave
Joseph Kosinski's prior two movies may have been action blockbusters, but their exclusive reliance on over-the-top sleekly-designed science-fiction elements immediately put them apart them from the more grounded world of Top Gun: Maverick. The sci-fi gizmos in Kosinski's earlier works are dazzling to look at, but it's unlikely such futuristic visual elements creep into Maverick's newest adventure. By contrast, Kosinski's 2017 movie Only the Brave has all kinds of realistic visual flourishes likely to be seen again in Top Gun: Maverick. Only the Brave is Kosinski's first foray into more grounded storytelling as he tells the story of the firefighter team Granite Mountain Hotshots. In many ways, this feature is the Kosinski directorial effort most likely to be a direct spiritual predecessor to Top Gun: Maverick.
Though aerial-set sequences are minimal (save for the sporadic brief presence of planes accidentally dumping water on the lead characters), there's plenty of elements of Only the Brave that feel like they'd be right at home in a Top Gun movie. For one thing, the sort of brotherly bonds between the assorted pilots in Top Gun are abundant in the interactions between individual firefighters in Only the Brave. For another, Top Gun was always about the idea that ordinary people could rise through the ranks and achieve something incredible, like piloting a piece of machinery as overwhelming as a fighter jet. Only the Brave wrings similarly inspirational emotions out of depicting its protagonists as everyday people mustering up the courage to face immense life-threatening wildfires.
Only the Brave also continues Kosinski's recurring theme of exploring the long-term impact of absent fathers through the character of Brendan McDonough (Miles Teller). Having grown up with an absent father, McDonough wants to join the Granite Mountain Hotshots out of an urge to be a good stable father for his newborn daughter. Kosinski and Teller will reunite to explore that thematic terrain for Top Gun: Maverick. Teller is one of two key Only the Brave cast members, alongside Jennifer Connelly, who'll be reuniting with Kosinski on his foray into the world of Top Gun. Between those two and Oblivion leading man Tom Cruise, Top Gun: Maverick's cast will be rife with big-name talent that Kosinski has worked with in the past.
