There's a scene in the middle of Top Gun: Maverick in which Tom Cruise sits down with Val Kilmer, his adversary from the first Top Gun, released 36 years ago. Kilmer's Iceman was easily the most interesting character from the original—a brilliant and arrogant pilot properly susp*cious of and yet attracted to the extreme recklessness of Cruise's Maverick.
In the decades since, Top Gun: Maverick tells us, Iceman has risen through the ranks of the Navy to become commander of the Pacific fleet. Maverick has remained an imprudent bureaucratic player who has never risen above the rank of Captain. Maverick is so impossible to discipline that he has only been able to remain in the Navy because of the protection of his old sparring partner—who, we learn from a series of offhanded text messages...