The upcoming sequel Top Gun: Maverick may have dropped Tom Cruise’s love interest, Charlie (Kelly McGillis), but there’s a good reason for the change and it’s the right choice for the movie to make. After over 30 years away from the big screen, the Top Gun franchise is finally set to make its long-awaited return to cinemas in 2021. The movie may be missing its original directors, but many fans are still excited for what the sequel to Cruise's enduringly popular movie can cook up.
Originally released in 1986, The Last Boy Scout director/action cinema legend Tony Scott’s original Top Gun was a campy 80s cult classic that told the inimitable tale of Maverick, a cocksure pilot who enlisted in the Navy thanks to his insatiable need for speed. Action-packed, funny, and surprisingly emotionally involving for an action movie, Top Gun remains critically acclaimed thanks to Scott’s careful tonal balancing act that combined intense action with an involving story of Maverick's personal growth and real heartbreak, a rare feat in a genre all too often undervalued by film snobs.
Top Gun: Maverick has been in production for decades, and fans are tentatively excited about the movie’s arrival in cinemas in 2021. However, as is the case with many belated sequels, many of the original cast of Top Gun will not be returning for this new addition to the franchise. One of the most notable names missing from the sequel’s credits is Charlie, Maverick’s love interest in the first film. A civilian aeronautics engineer (who was originally intended to be a fellow cadet, only for the Pentagon to warn the creators that the Navy looked down on office romances), Charlie was a spunky, if underdeveloped, character who humanized the otherwise somewhat cold Maverick and gave viewers a relationship to root for. Despite this, Top Gun: Maverick is right to drop the character, as the sequel's story will be stronger and more streamlined without a returning romantic interest.
Top Gun Was Never About Romance
Despite being a fun and funny story, the original Top Gun is nonetheless mainly the tale of the intensely solitary pursuit of perfection. Yes, Maverick does come to care for his fellow recruits and mentors, but the character begins his journey obsessed with his goal and never drops his laser focus even at the movie’s climax. Any interpersonal growth is secondary to his attempts to be the greatest, fastest pilot to ever fly and live up to his father’s history of heroism, and the movie repeatedly makes this clear by sidelining his serviceable subplot with Charlie. Like darker cinematic studies of perfectionism such as Whiplash or The Prestige, themes of romance or even brotherhood come second to a lone antihero’s attempts to do the impossible or destroy himself trying. It’s a moving story that Tom Cruise did a solid job selling in the first film, but it’s also a narrative so focused that the Charlie subplot is forgettable at best and easily jettisoned from the film entirely at worst.
But It Does Have A Classic Love Story
That being said, there is a solid love story worth keeping in the original Top Gun, even if it isn't the movie's main focus. This subplot intertwines with the movie’s themes of rugged individualism and growing out of total self-sufficiency and into trusting others, but it’s not the love story between Charlie and Maverick. As Quentin Tarantino noted all those years ago, the love story at the core of Top Gun is between Iceman and Maverick. Not only is this tale of enemies becoming inseparable a B-story to the primary plot’s tale of Maverick’s obsessive need for speed, but it also takes place between two fellow cadets rather than Cruise and his love interest. Although, unfortunately, the sequel isn’t going full Cobra Kai and retelling Top Gun from his perspective, Kilmer is returning for Top Gun: Maverick to reprise his iconic role as Iceman.
In the course of the original Top Gun, the mismatched Maverick and Iceman progress from being mostly harmless rivals to genuinely hating one another after Goose’s tragic death, only for them to work together and become inseparable besties by the end. The pair go from bitter enemies to fire-forged friends in an archetypical story that has resonated with generations of audiences. The fact that Top Gun’s main story isn’t a romantic love story, and that even its main love story isn’t between Maverick and Charlie, is further proof that Cruise’s original romantic interest would be an entirely superfluous addition to the sequel. Although it’s unlikely that Top Gun: Maverick will reveal Iceman and Maverick’s love to be anything more than platonic, it’s nonetheless a classic love story that deserves some of the sequel’s focus, and between that B-story and Maverick’s pursuit of his passion, the sequel has little room for Charlie. And speaking of how overstuffed Top Gun: Maverick could potentially be…
Top Gun Isn’t Short On New Characters
From Miles Teller to Scream Queens breakout star Glen Powell to Mad Men’s Jon Hamm, along with others, the long-awaited sequel already has an impressively full cast, all of whom viewers still need to be introduced to. Top Gun: Maverick only has one movie’s worth of screen time to flesh out innumerable new additions to the cast, while also doing justice to Maverick’s personal growth and his relationship with Iceman (which explains why some viewers presume that Iceman may meet an early exit, to thin out the massive cast list at least a little). With such a busy cast there's little need for the film to revisit a plotline from the original which was not massively impactful, and Charlie’s return would easily have been lost in the mix.
While her and Maverick’s romance wasn’t the most important of Top Gun’s plotlines, it’s tidier to keep it as a standalone story instead of trying to work it into a well-stuffed sequel. Already, there are a lot of signs that Top Gun: Maverick may not be as irresistibly fun as the well-loved original blockbuster, but if nothing else, the absence of Charlie should be evidence for hesitant fans that the sequel is heading in the right direction when it comes to keeping the spirit of the original film alive. Instead of being bogged down by nostalgia, the creators are forging ahead with a new cast and a new story. It may be nearly impossible for Top Gun: Maverick to recreate the impact of Scott’s inimitable original, but by trimming unnecessary fan service, the sequel can at least hope to do as well as Cruise’s other huge 2021 release, Mission: Impossible 7.
