New “Top Gun: Maverick” Trailer Sees Tom Cruise Back in the Danger Zone

Pete “Maverick” Mitchell might be not a young hotshot flyboy anymore, but the dude can still go Mach 4 with his hair on fire. Maverick is played, of course, by Tom Cruise, who returns to the role that made him an international superstar way back in 1986 when the original Top Gun took flight. Paramount Pictures has released a new trailer for Top Gun: Maverick, which opens with a bunch of hotshot young flyboys and girls showing off and peacocking in front of each other, just as the lads did back in 86′. It’s Monica Barbaro young pilot—call sign “Phoenix”— who asks the pertinent question; considering they’re the best of the best, “who the hell are they gonna get to teach us?” Yes, who? Well, we have one idea.

Enter Maverick, who returns to teach these young Navy hotshots a thing or two. Since we last saw Mav, he’s left the Navy and become a test pilot, eschewing what could have been a successful career of rising through the Navy ranks to remain in the place he’s most at home—a cockpit. He’s tapped by the Navy to teach these Top Gun graduates a thing or two before they take on a specialized mission “the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen.” One of those pilots has a deep, personal connection to Maverick—his name is Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign “Rooster,” and he’s the son of Maverick’s late friend Lt. Nick Bradshaw, better known as “Goose” (Anthony Edwards). Thus Maverick is forced to face the son of the friend he lost in Top Gun during a disastrous flight, the friend whose death he blamed himself for.

And guess who summoned Maverick back into the Navy fold? None other than Admiral Kazansky himself. If you’re struggling to place why that name is important, we’ll give you Admiral Kazansky’s call sign: “Iceman.”

Top Gun: Maverick comes from director Joseph Kosinski, based on a screenplay by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Cruise’s longtime Mission: Impossible collaborator Christopher McQuarrie. The set-up ties in Maverick’s former exploits, his old wounds, his old friends, and places them all in conflict with the new crop of talent and the unusual, dangerous mission he’s there to prep them for. One imagines that by the time that mission takes place, Maverick might find himself back in the cockpit of a Navy fighter jet.

Check out the new trailer below. Top Gun: Maverick zooms into theaters on May 27.

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Featured image: Tom Cruise plays Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick from Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer Films. Credit: Scott Garfield. © 2019 Paramount Pictures Corporation.