My rating	IMDb		Rotten Tomatoes
	Critics	Audience	Critics	Audience
8/10	78/100	8.7/10	96%	99%

Numbers obtained from IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes on May 30, 2022.

Very rarely do sequels take decades to be made. Especially nowadays, when the urge to release something familiar to the audience is so unstoppable that sequels are pretty much all there is to see in theaters.

Top Gun: Maverick, however, comes 36 years after the original movie hit theaters. I wasn’t even born when it came out! I didn’t even know people were craving for a continuation to that story. Maybe they weren’t. But judging by the opening box office, it was a welcome surprise.

Tom Cruise reprises his role as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, one of the Navy’s top aviators with a huge ego and little interest being grounded, which is why he always avoided being promoted to a higher rank. Now he’s being called back to train Top Gun graduates for a very important mission. That’s when he’s forced to face Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign “Rooster,” the son of Maverick’s late friend (Anthony Edwards).

The story itself is very predictable, with very similar conflicts among the graduates that we saw in the original Top Gun. The lack of character development for the women is also present here, even after all these years. Jennifer Connelly is undoubtedly a great actress, but she has little to work with and serves more as a fantasy not only for Maverick, but also for the male audience. So, what’s the draw? It’s the third act and the exhilarating flight sequence that leaves the audience on the edge of their seat. It’s clearly an experience meant for movie theaters and not for streaming.