Top Gun: Maverick (Lorne Balfe/Harold
Faltermeyer/Various) Rarely do nostalgic sequels succeed with such
universal acceptance as 2022's
Top Gun: Maverick, the long
awaited and long overdue but ultimately perfectly timed sequel to the
1986 blockbuster,
Top Gun. Paramount reunited Jerry Bruckheimer
and Tom Cruise for an intelligent continuation of the original story,
Cruise's character of Pete "Maverick" Mitchell still defying U.S. Navy
rules in his plight to prove himself and the technology of his planes.
Reassigned from testing an experimental "Darkstar" aircraft unsafely,
his former competitor and now lifelong friend, Admiral Tom "Iceman"
Kazansky protects and supports his career, sending him to train young
aviators for a dangerous foreign mission. With one of those pilots the
son of his lost flight partner from the first film, Nick "Goose"
Bradshaw, tensions abound. Maverick eventually proves himself to the
team, leads the mission, and rekindles a failed prior romance. The movie
struck all the right feel-good chords with audiences and pleased the
U.S. Department of Defense with its accuracy and positive depiction of
fighter pilots in an age of increasingly unmanned weaponry. Cruise
absolutely insisted upon two vital ingredients to this triumph: the
emotional return of Val Kilmer as Iceman despite his difficulty speaking
after battling throat cancer and, as a boon to his own payday, the
refusal to sell the movie's rights to any streaming services for
up-front distribution. As a lifeline for struggling theatre chains,
Top Gun: Maverick collected nearly $1.5 billion in grosses, a sum
only surpassed later in the year by
Avatar: The Way of Water;
these two spectacular visual feasts provided renewed hope for saving
theatrical cinematic releases as a concept. The soundtrack of
Top
Gun remains among the most successful of all-time, its collection of
songs and Harold Faltermeyer's score persisting as iconic
representations of 1980's pop culture. It was impossible in the
following ten years to avoid Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone," Berlin's
"Take My Breath Away," or Faltermeyer's score anthem on radio stations
or in Paramount's theme parks. They were as ubiquitous as any soundtrack
in a generation.
For
Top Gun: Maverick, the production clearly
sought to extend its mission of nostalgia to its soundtrack, and the
results are largely successful at that task. The Loggins song, "Danger
Zone," returns, as does the source usage of "Great Balls of Fire." The
two new songs leading the soundtrack are "I Ain't Worried" by
OneRepublic and "Hold My Hand" by Lady Gaga, the latter a retro rock
ballad clearly meant as a substitute for the Berlin song. Half a dozen
other songs litter the film but do not feature on the soundtrack album.
The Lady Gaga entry is the awards bait from the presentation, a
pleasantly belted number except for the awful vocal manipulations at its
start. Hans Zimmer was tasked with tackling the score for
Top Gun:
Maverick, a simmering mess which he approached with trepidation out
of a fear that he would yield an inferior product compared to the 1986
soundtrack. In an effort to maintain the same character and quality of
Top Gun, he reached out to Faltermeyer and moved him into the
Zimmer-led Remote Control Productions (RCP) complex for close
involvement on the new score. After initial tumult with the score,
frequent Zimmer collaborator Lorne Balfe took the lead in coordinating
its composition, though because of the usual, frustrating legalities of
contractual credit, Balfe doesn't receive a compositional nod in the
film itself. (He does, however, lead the compositional credit on the
album.) Balfe and Zimmer teamed up for their usual synthesizer
programming duties, and they closely involved Lady Gaga in the
construction of several cues that adapt her song's melody, leading to
her receiving top composer credit as well. (Faltermeyer, interestingly,
disliked sharing composing credit with Lady Gaga, taking his displeasure
public.) While scores adapt song melodies without credit all the time,
Zimmer and Balfe insist that Lady Gaga's collaboration with them was
significant enough to merit the top line credit. Not as fortunate, of
course, is the army of Zimmer (and now Balfe) clones wandering the halls
of RCP and contributing to this score as ghostwriters. Leading these
aspiring souls are Andrew Kawczynski, David Fleming, and Steve Mazzaro,
along with five other arrangers and hordes of assistants and "music
consultants." Zimmer earns his pay collecting all this talent for
projects such as this, though the results vary in quality.
On the surface, the soundtrack for
Top Gun:
Maverick is just as much a success as the film itself. Zimmer and
Balfe strike the right balance of Faltermeyer's 1980's character and the
more contemporary techniques that have made Zimmer's music popular in
more recent decades. The product as a whole is a decent modernization of
the prior soundtrack, with more than enough references to
Top Gun
at the proper times to suffice. Something has to said for Zimmer and
Balfe in their ability to please a crowd. At the same time, the score
for
Top Gun: Maverick offers extremely simple, repetitive new
themes and no really complex constructs anywhere, the density sparse and
the rather bonehead techniques of brooding instrumental tones and tired
action ostinatos consistent to Zimmer and Balfe's most standard styles.
In short, this is dumb but mostly satisfying music, and few viewers will
be expecting high art in this circumstance. The Zimmer technique of
constructing a cue around one long crescendo of repeating chords, a
habit adopted by Balfe, is extremely tiresome and is applied a few times
here. The synthetics and orchestra are heavily weighted towards the bass
region, emphasizing masculine heroism without much lofty treble
interference. The action music is the weakness in the score, a really
obnoxious, slurring bass pitch effect against pointlessly slapping
rhythms causing annoyance in "Tally Two" and "Canyon Dogfight," the
latter cue mashing the score's themes together inelegantly and
concluding with orchestral stinger effects that are extremely grating;
these passages are reportedly the work of Andrew Kawczynski, though cue
sheet attribution is tough to trust on a project like this. Outside of
these cues, you do receive the standard ostinatos chugging through their
anonymous low string mannerisms, and overblown melodrama from Zimmer's
earlier days does influence "Dagger One is Hit." Perhaps more
interesting are the shadows of
Crimson Tide in "Give 'Em Hell," a
cue credited to Zimmer himself. Most audiences will be far more
interested in the anthemic and romantic portions, however, and these
cues are better handled by Zimmer and Balfe. The simplistic nature of
the performances suits these aspects of the score, their style
prevailing well over their substance as they convey the easily
digestible themes from the franchise.
While the orchestrations and performance-oriented aspects
of the themes in
Top Gun: Maverick may sound tonally juvenile,
Zimmer and Balfe do apply them quite intelligently in the spotting
process. Returning at the forefront is Faltermeyer's main 1986 anthem
and, in a notable surprise, his theme for Goose. Interpolated
extensively is the Lady Gaga song's theme for Maverick's romantic
inclinations and sense of family with his fellow pilots. Most likely
from Balfe comes a simple new theme for the Darkstar concept that
represents Maverick's renegade nature more generally. Finally, the best
theme in the score derives from Giorgio Moroder's melody from the
"Danger Zone" song, reportedly adapted by Zimmer here as a determination
motif to augment the action sequences. The primary anthem from
Faltermeyer is modernized in "Main Titles (You've Been Called Back to
Top Gun)," prominent electric guitar renditions provided at 1:15 and
1:34, the latter beefed up with Zimmer's synthetic style. The wet reverb
and clarity of synthesizers and percussion in this rendition are superb.
The track ends with only the initial three notes of the melody on a
horn-like tone at 2:09, and this technique of abbreviating the theme
like this is everywhere in the score, often supplied as counterpoint to
other activity. (Ignore album credits that indicate that this theme is
in only a few tracks; it's in nearly everything.) The first three notes
as a reminder motif continue at 1:03 and 1:26 into "Darkstar," becoming
more prominent at 2:16 as counterpoint to the Darkstar/Maverick theme.
The interlude sequence of the anthem is transformed for melodrama in the
second minute of "Dagger One is Hit." The three-note motif recurs at
1:44 and 2:07 into "What's the Plan" and opens "The Man, The Legend"
multiple times before resolving to the full theme at 1:01 on brass and
synths. The motif of the first three notes returns over the
Darkstar/Maverick theme at 1:05 in "Canyon Dogfight" and again at that
cue's end. An obligatory, suite-like performance of the main theme
closes out the album in "Top Gun Anthem" with orchestral backing to the
electric guitar, which is performed well in both the "Main Titles" and
here. It's unclear the extent to which Faltermeyer coordinated the
applications of the anthem's fragments to the rest of the score, but he
is at least credited with compositional credit on the majority of the
cues.
The love theme of
Top Gun: Maverick serves not
only Maverick's own romantic endeavors but also a broader sense of
redemption and family. It's built upon truly basic pop song
progressions, six-note phrases repeating with only the final two notes
changing over ultra-pleasant chords. Zimmer seems to have taken the
forefront in adapting this melody into the score, and he and Lady Gaga
alternate between providing extended adaptations of the full melody and
restrained conveyance of only its underlying chords. Those chords alone
debut at 0:14 into "You're Where You Belong," and the full theme emerges
at 1:00 on keyboard, leading to a dramatic escalation on strings and
brass. Thereafter, the melody simply repeats for 100 seconds without
clear, compelling secondary phrasing; it's pleasant, but it never
arrives at a particular destination. The melody slides into anthemic
form over string ostinatos at 1:54 into "Touchdown," the fuller
treatment for the song's secondary phrases nice though simplistic. A
reduction from trumpet counterpoint to solo keyboard at the end of this
cue is a poignantly heartfelt touch. For the actual romantic part of the
story, the theme enjoys a performance on keyboards and synth wash at
0:29 into "Penny Returns (Interlude)," after which the orchestra takes
only the melody's chords in the cue's second half. Balfe's new material
for the Darkstar concept and associated Maverick tendencies towards
insubordination manifests in the score's most generic idea. The slowly
rising, four-note sequence utilizes dramatically easy but simplistic
chords familiar to the safest expressions of Zimmer and Balfe for such
situations in prior works. The motif is muted at 0:19 and 0:39 into
"Darkstar" over urgent string rhythms, gaining strength at 1:14 and 1:33
and eventually shifting to more noble brass at 1:56 with consecutive
statements to end the cue's expected crescendo format. With different
harmonies, the idea accesses essentially the same four chords at 3:57
into "Give 'Em Hell." The chords shift around again in "What's the
Plan," but the same four-note formation persists, becoming an
obnoxiously loud crescendo of repetition on strings by "F-14." The
Darkstar/Maverick motif returns in a three-note abbreviation at 0:54 and
2:02 into "Canyon Dogfight" before rediscovering its full form at 0:40
into "The Man, The Legend" on strings and then low brass. All of this
material suffices on a basic level but generates little extroverted
excitement in the process.
The most intellectually interesting thematic choices in
Top Gun: Maverick involve Zimmer and Balfe's (though presumably
mostly Zimmer's) choice to adapt two musical identities from
Top
Gun for logical extensions in the sequel. Hearing the melody of the
"Danger Zone" song (specifically the "highway to the danger zone"
lyrical sequence) translated into this score's determination theme is a
true delight. These descending seven-note phrases that also shift only
their final few notes each time may not trigger connections to the song
for some listeners because the instrumental tones are so different from
those of the song, but the structural connection is impossible to miss
once you make it. This theme is heard at 3:07 and thereafter in "Give
'Em Hell" on nervous strings over deep brass pulses and chime, exposed
on full brass at 4:56 in brute force. The usage recurs at 2:38 into
"What's the Plan" on brass, repeated several times. It's obvious with
frantic urgency at 0:42 and 1:37 into "Canyon Dogfight" as well. The
other heart-warming expansion of the 1986 soundtrack involves the
reapplication of the Faltermeyer theme for Goose, long forgotten by many
because of its absence from the 1986 soundtrack album, to represent
Maverick's interactions with that character's son here. It's alluded to
in the dramatic first minute of "Dagger One is Hit" but becomes explicit
at 4:19 on horn and at 4:47 on strings in "Time to Let Go." This melody
has always been one of the emotional peaks of Faltermeyer's 1986 score,
so kudos to Zimmer and his team for applying it as clearly appropriate
in the sequel. These spotting victories are the bright points of the
soundtrack for
Top Gun: Maverick, and the whole product is
largely satisfying even if its new material lacks distinction. As
typical for an Interscope album, only half an hour of score is included
amongst the most prominent songs. The
Top Gun cue "Viper Comes
Down on Mav" is credited in the film as being reprised but is not on the
album. The challenging "Canyon Dogfight" action cue is only available on
the Japanese CD version of the release. Balfe himself has assured fans
of the score and film that he is assembling a longer release of the
score despite its repetitive nature, and this work was happening with
the blessing of the studio and label. But that product never
materialized before the end of 2022, as Balfe had busied himself with
new scoring assignments. Regardless, the main commercial album will
suffice for most listeners. The predictably simplistic score, while
thoughtful at times and blissfully nostalgic, struggles to find new
skies to conquer.
@Amazon.com: CD or
Download
- Music as Written for the Film: ****
- Music as Heard on Album: ***
- Overall: ***
| Bias Check: |
For Lorne Balfe reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.83
(in 30 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 2.86
(in 23,468 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.85
(in 128 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 2.96
(in 299,131 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
The inserts of the Interscope album and regular Japanese
Universal album contain extensive credits but no extra information about
the score or film. That of the Japanese Universal "Deluxe Edition"
variant features a 7-inch cardboard sleeve and contains a sticker and
poster.
