‘Top Gun 2’: Theory suggests that Maverick was dead the entire movie

SPOILERS FOR ‘TOP GUN MAVERICK’ FOLLOW

Even if you love ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ (and you should, because it sucks)you’ll admit that it can get pretty ridiculous at times.

We’re not just talking about the intense and exciting scenes where everything seems to happen at the right time, including a couple of desperate rescue attempts. It’s built into the very setup of the legacy sequel, as Maverick (Tom Cruise) is called back to Top Gun to train the pilots for an impossible mission that only he knows how to do.

That’s a classic action movie concept, to be sure, but an excellent new theory from vulture suggests there’s a logical plot reason why everything escalates so much: it’s all a dying Maverick fantasy.

We are about to enter spoilersso one last warning if you haven’t seen ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ yet.

When we meet Maverick at the beginning of the movie, he is about to attempt to reach Mach 9 in a hypersonic jet as part of the Darkstar program. He was told that Rear Admiral Cain is on his way to shutting it down to redirect funds to unmanned drones.

Before Cain arrives, Maverick takes to the skies anyway and reaches Mach 9 before deciding to advance to Mach 10, Darkstar’s planned goal. He manages to do that but, being a Maverick Maverick, he decides to push the scramjet further, which is when things go really wrong.

We see the plane break into pieces in the sky, and yet somehow in the next scene we see Maverick walk into a restaurant a bit dazed, but still alive and in one piece.. However, the theory argues that this never actually happens, and all we see is Maverick’s “death dream”.

Now, we know you’ve heard a lot of ‘They were dead all along!’ and, sure, this isn’t exact, but it holds up extremely well. But if you accept the “death dream”, it clears up a lot of the sequel’s minor drawbacks.

It’s Maverick’s dying fantasy, so of course he’s the only pilot in the world who can make this impossible mission work.. And of course, even though Maverick only intends to be the teacher, he ends up leading the mission which includes him making a sacrificial play to save Rooster, which he also somehow survives.

Even the fact that ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ leaves the real identity of the enemy unknown makes sense in theory. Maverick is only taking inspiration from his last big Top Gun mission, where he too faced an unspecified enemy in a similar fashion in the first movie.

That’s also why when we first meet Rooster, he is dressed exactly as his father Goose did and sports the same mustache, and then play the same song on the piano. He could even take the theory further and argue that Maverick and Rooster’s reconciliation in the finale is part of the fantasy, something Maverick couldn’t do in life.

You could also apply it to the other main relationships Maverick has in the movie. It had to be Iceman who recommended him for the mission since he supported Maverick throughout his career.while Maverick hangs out with Penny at the end as it’s another relationship that, like Rooster, Maverick didn’t do well in life.

Perhaps we are getting carried away here and, as we said, it is highly unlikely that Maverick died in the beginning. After all, the sequel has already been a huge success at the box office, which makes a third movie a serious possibility, and Maverick can’t be dead if that happens.

However, even so you can’t deny that the theory makes a lot of sense. As Vulture puts it, we could be seeing “someone dreaming impossible dreams right before they burn up in the atmosphere” and the movie would make just as much sense, if not more.

It may be a gloomy, dark kind of sense, but That doesn’t mean it can’t be true…