Top Gun: Maverick’s climactic air assault sequence gets put under the microscope by a retired Top Gun instructor, who looks at the film’s depiction of G-forces. Serving as a sequel to Tony Scott’s Top Gun from 1986, director Joseph Kosinski’s 2022 movie sees Tom Cruise return as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell to train a new batch of recruits for a dangerous mission. Although there are various impressive aerial sequences throughout the movie, the Top Gun: Maverick ending stands out as a notable highlight as Maverick and his team embark on a dangerous bombing run in enemy territory.
In a recent video for Insider, retired Top Gun instructor Dave Berke rates Top Gun: Maverick’s final mission, looking specifically at how accurate the movie is when it comes to G-forces.
While Berke takes issue with things like the pilots’ decision to fly under a bridge instead of over it and the fact that flares wouldn’t confuse an incoming radar-guided missile (flares only work against heat-seeking missiles), he is all praise when it comes to the G-force depictions. Check out select comments from Burke’s analysis below as well as his score for the climactic mission as a whole:
“The G-force depiction in this is fantastic. You see their faces getting pulled down, you see their eyes getting droopy. You see some of them look like they’re about to pass out. Those are all real things that happen, all things pilots have to fight against. When you pull a lot of Gs the blood starts to drain from your head and starts to pool down in your extremities. Now, as you know, if you don’t have any blood in your head, you lose consciousness.
“Before you have G-LOC [G-force induced loss of consciousness], you have something called grayout, which means you’re still conscious, but all your color vision starts to fade away and things turn gray. And sometimes you see the sides of your peripheral vision close in. […]
“I’d give this scene a 7 [out of 10] for realism.”
Why Top Gun: Maverick’s Aerial Sequences Look So Real
Tom Cruise & Joseph Kosinski Put A Big Focus On Doing Things Practically
While the original Top Gun features some impressive moments of aerial action, the sequel arguably blows the first film out of the water in this regard. The key members of the Top Gun: Maverick cast, including Miles Teller, Monica Barbaro, Glen Powell, and Lewis Pullman, among others, participated in what they dubbed “Tom Cruise Boot Camp,” which prepared them for the experience of high G-forces. Cruise is already an experienced pilot, and he and Kosinski evidently really wanted to capture the experience of being inside the cockpit for Top Gun: Maverick.
To accomplish this, actors went up in real fighter jets with experienced pilots and lots of cameras in the cockpit. Editor Eddie Hamilton revealed in January 2023 that over 800 hours of footage was captured for Top Gun: Maverick. The real pilots that accompanied the actors and actually piloted the fighter jets certainly put the actors through their paces, and the G-force seen affecting the stars’ faces is all real. While there’s certainly lots of CGI in Top Gun: Maverick, the focus on practical action and doing things for real ultimately makes the flying sequences that much more engaging.
The power of the aerial sequences is part of why the Top Gun: Maverick reviews were glowing from critics and audiences alike. The film sports a 96% critics’ score and 99% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and the sequel ultimately grossed $1.496 billion at the box office. Though not all of Top Gun: Maverick is accurate to the real-life fighter pilot experience, the film evidently gets G-forces very right.