Hell Yeah, Tom Cruise

Top Gun came out in the spring of 1986, a movie so big, so wall-to-wall, so resistance-is-futile that you just had to coexist with the damn thing until it finally went away. Now—like one of those flowers that comes into bloom only once every 40 years—it’s back.

Apparently Paramount had been after Tom Cruise to make a sequel before the original even opened, which is no surprise. In the 1980s studio executives began to operate more like hedge-fund managers, strip-mining any possible asset in a movie by making sequel after sequel until the thing was finally taken off life support. We can blame Francis Ford Coppola for that; in the 1970s he did the stunning and unrepeatable thing of making one of the greatest American movies of all time—and then making a sequel that was even better. In the ’80s Hollywood tweaked this golden formula by making horrible movies and then a series of progressively worse sequels (unintentionally giving birth to the greatest title in movie history: Rambo: First Blood Part II).

And now, after all these years: Top Gun: First Blood Part II. Or, as it is formally known, Top Gun: Maverick.

I kind of wanted to see it.

I was 24 when came out, and everyone in my generation saw it. The references and proto-memes and Academy Award callbacks have been part of my entire adult life. But I never saw it. In fact, the first time I saw the trailer, I thought, . This was partly because it looked like it was going to be really loud, and partly because it looked like