'Top Gun: Maverick' Is Getting Extremely Good Reviews

By Michael Hein

It's been about a week and a half since Top Gun: Maverick took flight, and the reviews are incredible so far. The movie has 97 percent positive ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average score of 8.3 out of 10. Read on for a sampling of the praise that critics are showering on this belated sequel.

Top Gun: Maverick picks up 36 years after the events of Top Gun (1986), with Tom Cruise reprising his role as Captain Pete "Maverick" Mitchell. It finds him returning to the lauded U.S. Navy program that he was in in the first movie and training a new generation of pilots in his own ways. The movie has been in the works for over a decade, and its release was greatly delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike other delayed movies, fans don't seem to have soured on this one over the long wait.

So far, 380 movie critics have weighed in on Top Gun: Maverick for Rotten Tomatoes, and they've been counted on sites like MetaCritic and other aggregators as well. Casual viewers have even more praise for the movie – over 25,000 viewers have left feedback on Rotten Tomatoes, and 99 percent of them have been positive.

Whether you're planning to see this movie for yourself or not, such high praise is hard to ignore. Here's a rundown of why the world is so infatuated with Top Gun: Maverick.

'Exceeding'

Peter Howell of The Toronto Star went so far as to say that Top Gun: Maverick brings "fresh drama and heart to the Top Gun tale, exceeding the '86 original." He argued that the character arcs do a lot of the leg work here, but that the action is what makes this movie.

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Reluctant

Like many hardcore movie buffs, The Observer's Mark Kermode seems reluctant to admit how much he enjoyed this sequel. He started his review off by calling Maverick "an eye-popping blockbuster that, for all its daft macho contrivances, still manages to take your breath away, dammit." After describing some of this manufactured drama and noting its lack of subtlety, Kermode wrote: "Personally, I found myself powerless to resist... and shamefully brought to tears by moments of hate-yourself-for-going-with-it manipulation."

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Timely

In a review for The Atlantic, David Sims points out just how perfect the timing was for this movie. He argues that it was finally released right in the sweet spot when it comes to COVID-19, franchise fatigue and the national appetite for action and melodrama. On Twitter, Sims later commented on the movie's continued box office performance, taking this as a vindication of his points.

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Cruise

Like many other critics, Richard Roeper of The Chicago-Sun Times gave a lot of the praise for this movie to Cruise and his infamous charisma. Even as he applauded the action, he marveled at Cruise's magnetism. However, even as they said it, critics like Roeper did pause to wonder how Cruise managed to maintain this magnetism in light of all his public controversies over the last three decades.

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Politics

ABC News critic Peter Travers summed up the way that many critics seemed to feel about Top Gun: Maverick's innate political implications. He wrote that the movie "is still rah-rah about American imperialism, but who cares?" In spite of the invasion of Ukraine and the violent atmosphere in so many other parts of the world right now, the action in this movie just seemed to work for Travers and critics like him.

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Franchise

The Wall Street Journal's John Anderson wrote a positive review of Top Gun: Maverick while mourning its implications for the movie industry at large. He called it "not a dislikable movie, by any means," but wondered why this success had to go to a revival of almost four decades rather than a fresh idea. He also made pointed reference to the U.S. military's subsidizing of this film, worried by that as well.

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Meta

Finally, A.O. Scott's review for The New York Times argues that the existence of a Top Gun sequel "in the age of drone warfare" is, by its very existence, "a meta-commentary" on "the necessity of combat pilots" and "the relevance of movie stars." He feels that the movie is making a case for the continued existence of summer blockbusters, action spectacles and theatrical experiences. Judging by the world's response so far, it seems to have succeeded.

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