I am in the minority here. I was looking forward to watching this because of all the raves with which the critics & fans have greeted it. Also, I remember the original quite fondly, and I was eager to see Tom Cruise defying the natural deprivations of others his same age.

On the last score, only, I was not disappointed. Elsewhere I could not go along with the overly lavish heaps of praise. Mr. Cruise's feats and the aircraft's stunts were impressive, but I could hardly tell one plane from another in the super-rapid editing, jumping from one wing of fighters to another in breathless, jumping-bean cuts.

The closeups of pilots in their cockpits were framed alike, adding to the difficulty of following the aerial dog-fighting, and my attempts to read helmets for call signs were defeated much of the time by the choppy cutting.

After a time, I just gave up, rested my eyes, and let auu major attraction of the movie-the meaningful movement of aircraft-go right over my head.

I wanted to get into the characters' relationships. The parental legacy, in the person of the son of our hero's former flying buddy, was intriguing. But the complexity of real and undeserved guilt was never resolved in therapeutic detail. Instead, it-and far too many other issues of male bonding-were blurred, one guy couple to the next, in repetitious & predictably firm handclaps accompanied by long, silent eye contacts, deep soul-to-soul stares between macho buddies.

I know guys are supposed to be long on the physical and short on the verbal, but couldn't they have some variation in the physical?

Jennifer Connelly provides a welcome relief from all the maleness. She gives some real depth to her under-written character. I would have appreciated more development in her character's line.