Tom Cruise returns as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in the forthcoming movie Top Gun: Maverick. It is a sequel to the 1986 movie Top Gun. The film is set in real time, which means that Cruise's fighter pilot is now 57 years old. How realistic is the idea that an ace pilot would return to combat at that age? Real life TOPGUN graduate Mike Crosby, who is 60 years old, looks at the question. He says pilots who stay in the military that long usually gain rank and become teachers and supervisors.
“So I’m not sure what rank they’re going to have Maverick, but the majority of the pilots are the young guys,” Crosby tells me. He has, however, seen enough movies to know that this inconvenient fact won’t stop Cruise and company. “Somehow they’ll get him into the action,” Crosby says. “He’ll be an instructor or commanding officer of TOPGUN, which would be a captain, and that’s someone in their early 50s. So it’s not unreasonable.” (As long as a pilot trained between the ages of 18 and 33, there isn’t a maximum age limit that would prevent someone like Maverick from flying.)
Instead, it’s how they get Maverick into the actual fighting that Crosby says he and his fellow fighter pilots will probably laugh at the most. “None of us who have been there will believe it. It’ll be like, ‘There’s nobody else left in the Navy!’ or something. But that’s okay: The best part of the movie is the action, and the flying scenes anyway.”
We all know that veterans and active military are the harshest critics of war films. Read more about how Tom Cruise might or might not pull off the role at his age at Mel magazine. Top Gun: Maverick is scheduled to open on December 23.