The first big set piece belongs to the Darkstar, the scramjet-powered hypersonic aircraft Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is flying while Rear Admiral Cain tries to cancel the programme. Maverick reaches the speed the programme needed. Then he can’t resist pushing past Mach 10, and the prototype is destroyed. Nobody needs to explain him after that. More than thirty years after graduating from Top Gun, he is still a decorated pilot who cannot leave a number alone, and his insubordination is the reason he never made flag rank.

It also costs him. Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, his old rival and friend, now commands the Pacific Fleet, and he steps in to have Maverick assigned to the Top Gun school at North Island. The Navy has not forgiven him. It has only found a use for him.

The use is a mission that sounds close to impossible. An unsanctioned uranium enrichment plant, buried in a bunker at the end of a canyon, has to be destroyed before it becomes operational. It is covered by surface-to-air missiles and GPS jammers, and defended by Su-57 fighters and F-14 Tomcats. The jamming rules out an attack by F-35s, so Maverick builds a plan around two pairs of F/A-18E/F Super Hornets carrying laser-guided bombs. His trainees are Top Gun graduates, and one of them is Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s dead best friend. Their friction is the emotional spine of the film, and Teller plays it with a stubbornness that looks like his own rather than an echo of anyone else’s.

The flying is what the film is for. Joseph Kosinski shot with IMAX-certified 6K full-frame cameras, and the aerial sequences feel physical and unusually clear. The soundtrack by Harold Faltermeyer and Hans Zimmer, with Lady Gaga‘s “Hold My Hand”, leans on the big, rising gestures you expect from this kind of picture, and the film won the Oscar for Best Sound, its only win from six nominations. The canyon run is the best of it. A bombing plan that has to be flown low, fast and in sequence is easy to follow, which is half of what makes it tense.

Cruise gives Maverick a tiredness the 1986 film never needed. He is still charming and still defiant, but the swagger now seems to cost him something. Jennifer Connelly, as Penny Benjamin, brings more warmth and ease than the script gives her room for. Jon Hamm and Charles Parnell play the admirals Simpson and Bates, and neither gets much beyond the uniform. Monica Barbaro (Phoenix), Lewis Pullman (Bob) and Bashir Salahuddin (Hondo) are good company and thinly drawn. The younger pilots mostly register as call signs.

The film’s weakness is that you can see the whole route from the first act. A veteran trains a younger generation while a wound from the past stays open, and the scenes between Maverick and Rooster follow the path you expect. At two hours and eleven minutes, the middle stretch also runs long. The training sequences are well made, but there are a few too many of them before the mission arrives.

The film took a long road to the screen. Paramount announced a sequel in 2010, with Cruise, the producer Jerry Bruckheimer and the director Tony Scott asked to return. A draft was written in 2012, and the project stalled when Scott died later that year. It only moved again in 2017, when Kosinski came on board. The complicated action and then the pandemic pushed the release back from its planned date of July 12, 2019, and when streaming companies tried to buy the film, Cruise insisted it open in cinemas only. Sitting in front of the canyon sequence on a large screen, it is hard to say he was wrong.

It premiered at CinemaCon on April 28, 2022 and reached American theatres on May 27. It went on to earn $1.5 billion worldwide, the biggest figure of Cruise’s career, and appeared on the National Board of Review and American Film Institute top-ten lists for 2022. The film is dedicated to Scott’s memory, and the dedication sits well on a picture this devoted to the pleasure of flying.