Top Gun: Maverick

For Tom Cruise, it’s not as much a reboot or sequel as it is a return: a startling thirty-six years have passed, yet Cruise shows no sign of slowing down. For the trailer, however, the star is a sound—namely, the sweeping whoosh of fighter planes. After a six-second micro-teaser, the trailer wastes little time (re)establishing the characters, partly to induce drama (“What the hell kind of mission is this?”, a pilot intones)—but the chatter is more of a set-up to the main attraction at 0:22. A jump cut to a precious few seconds of fighter plane action, with every turn of the plane accentuated by the sonic design, steals the show.

At 0:26 there’s a hint of 80s-tinged synth as the dialogue returns; at 0:35, the main theme from the first movie re-sounds, styled in a nostalgia-tinged, reverb-drenched piano. Some epic percussion segues into the reveal of the motorcycle, which Cruise then takes for a ride. Heroic brass builds the arrangement. At 0:54 the jet returns—note how the sound of the jet syncs fairly neatly with the brass arrangement, aligning Cruise’s heroism and bombast on screen with the musical score.

At 1:04 the music drops out, offering even more focus on the sounds of air combat—just in time for the audioviewer to witness a dogfight on screen. A very brief interlude at 1:14 uses a tubular bell juxtaposed against some near-meta commentary (“and we’re off”) before cutting again to Cruise’s pilot scenes again.

At 1:28 the soundtrack shifts gear one more time, now introducing an energetic strings motif. A montage brings a full-bore orchestral sequence combining strings, brass, and epic percussion—only to give way, one last time, to the sound of aircraft at 2:16.

That is the defining trait for Top Gun: Maverick’s “official” trailer. Sure, it ticks all the modern trailer music boxes with the nostalgic reverb piano melody from the first movie and building epic arrangement. However, these elements serve more as a requisite frame to those moments where one sees—and hears—nothing but Tom cruising the skies. That momentary reprieve from the everyday trailer tropes is what makes this trailer work so well in particular.

Top Gun: Maverick arrives in theatres May 27th.

— Curtis Perry