Late to the party I watched Top Gun: Maverick the sequel to 1986’s Top Gun. I did not rush out to see this acclaimed piece of cinema last year because I had watched the original in 1986 and found it lacking. I can say that the sequel is better, with a more defined arc and plot but hardly the sort of the movie that leaves a lasting positive impression.

36 years following the events of Top Gun, hotshot pilot Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, whose career has stalled at the rank of captain, is called to train and select a team for a daring nigh impossible mission to destroy an enemy Uranium enriching facility before it can come online and disrupt the delicate balance of nuclear power in the region. Complicating his task is that one of the pilots is Bradley Bradshaw the son of the man Maverick got killed in a training accident. Faced with a nearly unachievable mission and the deep personal resentment of his dead friend’s son, Maverick must find a way to seize success and get all the pilot home alive.

Unlike the first film, this movie presents us with a clear plot objective, destroy the enrichment facility, and a clear story objective, heal the rift between Maverick and Bradshaw. It’s easy to see why this move was such a hit in the theater. The aerial cinematography is fantastic and thrilling. On a massive screen it undoubtedly induced motion sickness for some of the audience. The writers, including long time Tom Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, avoid anything that might offend any member of the audience or close a foreign market. The enemy state is never named, the pilots are concealed under full-face black flight gear, and even the region is left unspecified. The enemy exists only conceptually.

Top Gun Maverick is a perfectly acceptable ‘popcorn’ flick with enough action to be thrilling and just enough character to have some emotional weight but hardly deserving of the industry’s top accolades for writing or Best Picture.

The rest of this review contains spoilers for the movie.

Many people have pointed the similarities between the mission in this movie with the climatic attack on the Death Star in Star Wars; a high-speed run down a narrow valley/trench to hit a small precise target. My mind went to a classic WWII film that inspired George Lucas, The Dam Busters, based on an actual mission that had those requirements. (Undoubtedly Top Gun: Maverick upset Peter Jackson because if he gets his remake of The Dam Buster produced, he will seem to be derivative rather than the other way around.)

I was bothered by some of the logical lapses in the story. There is a nearby enemy airfield that the US Navy kindly puts out of commission with a number of cruise missile strikes. That’s all well and good, but the SAM (Surface to Air) missile sites along the rim of the valley/trench, a very serious threat to the mission, are left utterly untouched. Once the cruise missiles hit the runway the Navy fails to fly any sorties to distract or confuse any enemy CAP (Combat Air Patrol) as cover for the real mission.

Thew entire third act, with Maverick and Bradshaw shot down and trying to escape the incognito enemy is far too fantastic to be believed. I had really hoped that they had killed Maverick when he used his own plane and its countermeasures to save Bradshaw. That would have a nice symmetry to it, Maverick got Bradshaw’s killed by being reckless but died saving Bradshaw. I wonder if Cruise’s ego refused such an ending.

Top Gun: Maverick while superior to the original remains essentially a brainless film well suited for popcorn and fun.