The Tragic and Triumphant in Skyfall and Maverick
Daniel Craig as James Bond.
When do heroes become obsolete? In Part I of this article, we explored how two big-budget action films, Tom Cruise’s 2022 Top Gun: Maverick and Daniel Craig’s 2012 James Bond thriller, Skyfall, ask that same question in two near-identical stories about a national hero called out of semi-retirement to save the world. We noticed that both movies share important parallels: both extend iconic, decades-old franchises that function as quasi-national myths; both feature Cold War heroes to some degree representative of their cultural ideals; and both end with the hero triumphing over twenty-first century technology by returning to the old-fashioned methods he used in his prime. Through these similarities, we found that both Maverick and Bond rehash old critiques of technological progress that dominated 19th century Anglo-American culture. The man, both films seem to agree, matters more than the machine.
While they agree on what progress is not, Maverick and Skyfall give us two distinct pictures of what progress actually is. Most significantly, Skyfall is the only film of the two to recognize the high cost of holding on to old ideals. It admits that even in victory, the life of men and of nations has a tragic dimension. Bond does not win easily against Silva. He limps from exile wounded and scraggly. He looks his age. He has to cut a bullet out of his shoulder before he can shoot straight again, and despite heroic efforts, he fails to save M from Silva. The good guys still carry the day, Bond and his country still live for the next mission, but a new “M” must take the old M’s place. No victory is without its defeats; no hero is without his scars and limitations; no one, not even James Bond, is exempt from paying due penance for his sins.
Tom Cruise as Maverick.
Maverick, in contrast, suffers no casualties. Tom Cruise is even more spry at the stick and rudder than he was three decades earlier. Maverick past his prime? Just watch him play beach sports, still shirtless. Maverick letting his friends get gunned down by enemy fighters? No one dies on Maverick’s watch. Even when Iceman, Maverick’s old classmate from the first Top Gun, dies of cancer, the tragedy only highlights Maverick’s seemingly ageless heroism. Time, it seems, can’t touch the best of the best.
What’s the upshot of this contrast? For one, both the Skyfall and Maverick endings play into national-historical myths that divide Anglo-America’s cultural cousinship: on one side, British half-resolve, half-resignation, despite the Blitz and bad weather, to “keep calm and carry on”; on the other, relentless American optimism that sees no problem too big to solve, no frontier too distant to explore, no death too certain to defy.
More importantly, Skyfall’s recognition of the tragic dimension of life opens up new horizons for old-fashioned heroism, even in a technologically advanced age, that Maverick ironically can’t reach—precisely because it refuses to accept its hero’s decline.
This theme crystallizes during one of the key scenes in Skyfall, when Silva escapes from an MI6 holding cell and makes an assassination attempt on M while she testifies before Parliament. Silva bursts into the chamber, gun firing, just as M concludes her testimony with a quote from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”:
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
M reads the poem in voice-over as the camera flashes to Bond chasing Silva through the Underground. But at this point, the audience sees that Bond won’t catch up to Silva before he makes the killing attempt on M. We hear Tennyson’s verse while we see Bond desperately trying, and ultimately failing, to recover “that old strength” he had in previous films. The cut-scenes suggest a parallel between Bond and the Greek hero Odysseus, the subject of Tennyson’s poem, who by the time we meet him in “Ulysses” has returned home from his decades-long wandering, lived a number of years as Ithaca’s “idle king,” and resolves to cast out on a new adventure, even though the risks of failure have risen with every year he’s fallen past his prime.
The key conviction for both Bond and Odysseus—at least mediated through Tennyson—is that this uphill battle against decline is heroic precisely because it is uphill. Similar to Thermopylae’s legendary 300 or Tennyson’s own “Charge of the Light Brigade,” the hero’s resolve is more admirable because he recognizes its futility—and crucially, decides that the futility is less important than the value at risk of being lost: the honor of a nation, the good of a people, the life of a friend. On this account, the determination to fight, rather than the result of the fighting, is the truer measure of acclaim. It follows that the greater the weakness, the greater the opportunity for heroic action—the further the decline, the higher both the possibility and the glory of the triumph.
Crucially, this vision of heroism hinges on a recognition of decline. If the hero does not admit that he’s ultimately fighting a losing battle against his own obsolescence, we have no reason to admire him in the particular way that we admire the aging Bond and Odysseus. The hero can achieve heroic action by overcoming other uphill battles—fighting technologically superior enemy airplanes, for example—but the Tennysonian way of aggrandizing his struggle, independent of its result, is unavailable to the hero who shows no sign of weakness. The stakes of his action, in an important sense, have shrunk.
“What do you see?” “A bloody big ship.”
Given this analysis, it’s no accident that the stakes of Maverick, for all its epic dogfighting, feel somewhat lower than the stakes of Skyfall. Where does Maverick struggle against his own slowing reflexes? Where does he feel betrayed not only by his skeptical superiors, but by his own body?
If Skyfall borrows its tragic sense of history from Tennyson, Maverick borrows its triumphalist sense of time from another iconic American action film: Christopher Reeve’s 1978 Superman. At the end of this movie, Lois Lane, Superman’s love interest, dies in a car accident, and Clark Kent, the inhuman hero, flies around the world enough times to reverse the planet’s rotation, turn back time, and bring her back to life. Hollywood physics notwithstanding, it’s a notoriously deus ex machina resolution that cheapens whatever tragedy strikes next (not to mention the holes it rips into the plot of any Superman movie in the Christopher Reeves universe). An asteroid hits Earth? Aliens invade America? Lex Luthor becomes president? Just let Superman reverse the world again. If time is unreal, so is tragedy. And without the possibility of real tragedy, we have no capacity for real choice and real heroic sacrifice.
Maverick might fall short of resurrecting Goose, but as the three decades strong best-of-the-best fighter pilot, he manages to redeem his past failure in almost as neat a fashion as does Superman, with almost as little cost. In the middle of the final mission, Maverick rescues Rooster, Goose’s son, from certain death and shoots down a fleet of fifth-generation fighters with Rooster reprising his father’s role in the back seat. Afterwards, Maverick lands triumphantly on the aircraft carrier in a scene shot almost exactly the same way as the final scene from the first Top Gun—except this time, “Goose” is back where he belongs, in Maverick’s navigator seat, as if he had never left. Maverick, it seems, has managed to fly his F-14 Tomcat fast enough to reverse time.
What uphill battles can a hero face if he never suffers decline, either because he’s powerful enough to manipulate time or strong enough to remain unaffected by it? Ability that denies any limit, ironically, limits the scope both of the hero’s achievement and its applicability to the audience’s life. We might admire the deeds, we might draw inspiration and excitement from watching them, but without any recognition of life’s tragic dimension, those deeds can only ever take place in a fantasyland divorced from the reality outside the theater, where the moth and rust destroy even the most heroic resolve. And what real chance do we viewers, stuck in a Skyfall world with no recourse to Maverick immortality, have for emulating heroism defined in unreal terms? A limited chance, at best.
We might be tempted to read Maverick’s failure to deal satisfactorily with life’s tragic dimension as a broader critique of the American attitude toward progress. If, judging from Maverick’s character arc, we take the film’s theme to be “Heroes will always triumph, without cost, no matter the passage of time and the evolution of technology,” then it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Maverick, and the culture he embodies to some extent, lives more in myth than in history. No hero, and no nation, can remain wholly aloof from the passage of time—no matter how fast and how far they fly.
But the upshot, I think, is more modest: Top Gun: Maverick is not meant to be a meditation on time and fate. It’s meant to be fun. And on that measure, it succeeds heroically.
Watching Maverick feels like riding in the backseat of an F-16 during a training dogfight. It’s an exhilarating ride, and at the end of the film, everyone knows it’s a drill. On any deeper read, Maverick is perhaps simply catharsis for die-hard Top Gun fans—a half-salute, half-happy ending for the generation that first fell in love with Maverick half a decade before the Iron Curtain fell. Perhaps it’s an escape for fans of all generations from post-pandemic reality, when the world already feels real enough as it is. Perhaps it’s a rally ‘round the flag event for a country fractured by political polarization. The film accomplishes each of these missions to some degree, even if it ultimately gives a less satisfying account of how old ideals ought to adapt to the world outside Maverick’s danger zone.
Taken together, though, Maverick and Skyfall offer an encouraging insight into the problem of heroic obsolescence: in the Tennysonian view, recognizing the reality of decline gives the hero greater opportunity to be heroic—the greater the challenge, the more admirable the effort to overcome it. This suggests that the horizon for heroic action widens the greater the threat of technological obsolescence the hero faces. The ideal attitude toward progress, technology, and decline, then, would seem to be a marriage of Bond’s realism with Maverick’s optimism: a kind of Anglo-American blend of practical idealism that deals seriously with the costs of progress without losing confidence in the best of the old-fashioned ways.
What does this look like in practice? Both films suggest an answer in their rejection of technological determinism, the idea that advances in technology render human action less and less influential over the course of events, and that whichever side has the superior tools must carry the day. Against this view, both Maverick and Bond argue that history is ultimately written by men, not by machines. In the opening scene of Maverick, it’s the human test pilot who pushes the Mach-10 plane outside the envelope. In Skyfall, Bond’s new gadgets actually help him deploy the old-fashioned methods better than he did in his heyday: a fingerprint sensitive gun, for example, that only fires when Bond pulls the trigger. “Less of a random killing machine,” Bond’s quartermaster explains, “and more of a personal touch.” These scenes suggest that we can find productive ways of navigating our relationship to technology, even as the use and abuse of that technology is ultimately mediated by human—often all-too-human—choices.
While both films concede that technology shapes the future, perhaps to a greater extent than it once did and to a lesser extent than it one day will, the determining factor in the life of heroes and of nations still seems to be not the gun or the plane, but the person behind the trigger. And insofar as those operations—from the heroic to the mundane—never stop shaping the world outside the theater, we may find that heroes never really retire, after all.
Lauren Spohn is a Rhodes Scholar pursuing a PhD in History at the University of Oxford. A private pilot and avid runner, she has worked in tech and finance and writes about philosophy, culture, and technology for a variety of outlets.