First things first. Top Gun Maverick is entertaining enough. If you're one of those people for whom that is all that matters in a movie, read no further.

Beyond that, there are two ways to look at this film. The first and most obvious is that this is a replica of the original movie. Moviegoers and critics alike easily find themselves drawn to the game of comparing the original to the replica and seeking to assess if one is marginally better than the other, losing sight that the very issue is that one is drawn into that game. Inserting marginal differences into a movie is not what creativity, story-telling or great filmmaking are about. And while the film has been hailed as (yet another) savior of the big screen, ironically one of the most permanent feelings one experiences while watching it in the theatre is that you don't really need to be there.

The second way to look at Top Gun Maverick is as a satire or criticism on American filmmaking today. The parallels between the original and this sequel are so strong that they become surreal, so extreme that one feels they must carry meaning. From the initial text explaining what Top Gun is (identical to the one from the original film) to the son of Goose singing Great Balls of Fire on the same piano of the same bar with the same mustache and the same shirt as his Dad thirty years ago, the scenes and the shots parallel the first movie to an extreme, almost reminiscent of Gus Van Sant's Psycho, or of the constant time-loop repetition in Edge of Tomorrow (McQuarrie is listed as screenwriter in in that film as well as in TG-M). The only difference with the original seems to be the planned mission, which is itself a reproduction of the Star Wars A New Hope final scene -one of the most famous action scenes ever-, as if to underscore that even a change introduced in an American film today can only be a reproduction of some other movie.

The very first scenes of TG-M would support this theory. In those, we see Maverick testing a new stealth plane to have it reach Mach 10. The scene has the distinct feeling of the final scene of a movie, and the most memorable images in all of TG-M. It seems to hint at what this different story was that could have been told. Unfortunately, the plane test is interrupted by an Admiral who prefers drones to manned planes, a likely analogy to Hollywood executives who want movies made on auto-pilot.