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Top Gun: Maverick is due in theaters on June 26, 2020.Paramount/Skydance
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Tom Cruise reprises the role of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a naval aviator who starts the film working as an instructor.Paramount/Skydance
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Maverick still likes riding a sport bike. Sometimes he takes a special lady friend with him.Paramount/Skydance
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But mostly he flies. Lucky Maverick. And lucky Tom Cruise, because he got a whole bunch of seat time in real fighter jets.Paramount/Skydance
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Why is he going back into active duty? “They’re called orders, Maverick.”Paramount/Skydance
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This is the face of someone who knows they’re getting paid to do something they’d do for free. I could be referring to Maverick or Cruise there…Paramount/Skydance
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I hope you like F/A-18 Super Hornets, because that’s basically almost all the Navy flies these days, so you’re going to see a lot of Super Hornets.Paramount/Skydance
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Maverick loves the Super Hornet. You should be like Maverick and love it, too.Paramount/Skydance
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You’d love the Super Hornet if the Navy let you take off from a carrier in one. I know I would.Paramount/Skydance
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“Have you ever flown two Super Hornets in the air at one time while going “aah”?”, he asked, badly paraphrasing Constable Butterman in Hot Fuzz.Paramount/Skydance
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“Have you ever flown three Super Hornets in the air at one time while going “aaah”??”Paramount/Skydance
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Goose is still dead, but his son Brad is now a naval aviator.
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If we’re not flying and we’re not singing, we might be playing beach football.Paramount/Skydance
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Women also fly Super Hornets, because its 2019 for crying out loud.Paramount/Skydance
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At some point, things get hairy.Paramount/Skydance
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There will be tragedy in this movie.Paramount/Skydance
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Rejoice! It’s not just Super Hornets, there’s at least one flying F-14 Tomcat. The trailer actually opens with this in flight, but I’m a monster who likes surprises so I hid it towards the end of this gallery.Paramount/Skydance
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There is a second F-14, one permanently attached to the ground.Paramount/Skydance
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Maverick appears to have a P-51 Mustang.Paramount/Skydance
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Which he flies.Paramount/Skydance
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Yeah, about that…Paramount/Skydance
Do you remember where you were when the first official trailer for Top Gun: Maverick showed up on the Internet in July? I do. I was on a plane, about to take off, and while I had a lot of feelings about it I valiantly swallowed them as Tech Culture Editor Sam Machkovech had all the fun. Well, Slack tells me that Sam is still asleep, and there’s a new trailer out for the return of Top Gun, so this time he can be my wingman.
This summer’s trailer raised plenty of questions. Why was Pete “Maverick” Mitchell still in the Navy, decades after we saw him in the first movie? And what was that weird pressure suit he was wearing at one point? And can an entire movie about naval aviation still be cool if all the planes are F/A-18 Super Hornets with their goofy looking (and drag-inducing) canted pylons?
This new trailer clears up some of those questions, and obviously there will be spoilers to a degree, so stop reading now if that’s something you want to avoid before you see the film next year.
An admiral, played by Charles Parnell, has the answer to the first question: “they’re called orders, Maverick.” That weird pressure suit goes with a weird-looking stealth plane that Maverick gets to fly for reasons that remain unexplained. The final one was a trick question, because there are at least two F-14 Tomcats (albeit one is a gate guard) and a P-51 Mustang that get air time alongside the US Navy’s current workhorse.
There’s some new stuff to see—air-to-ground counts as diversity compared to the first movie, but we also get to see women fly fighter jets and also play beach volleyball. But as has become the way with Hollywood and its inability to deviate from what worked the first time around, there is plenty of fan service on display. Maverick riding his bike as the sun sets. Maverick and a special lady friend riding his bike as the sun sets. Dudes playing ball sports on the beach. Air combat maneuver training in the desert. It’s all there and looks predictably gorgeous.
There’s also a character who at first glance looks like a CGI’d Anthony Edwards, but it’s not Goose, it’s his son Brad Bradshaw, played by Miles Teller. Upon hearing the news this morning, “his daddy bequeathed his mustache to his son before he died” was all Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson had to say.
Listing image by Paramount/Skydance