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**SPOILER ALERT** Top Gun: Maverick is a film and cultural phenomenon and catches up with experienced flight pilot "Maverick" (played by Tom Cruise) whose career as a Navy Pilot has been guided by his skills and his desire to be a pilot rather than following the regimented rules of the military and climbing the hierarchy. Due to the complexity and importance of a specific mission (bombing an underground uranium enrichment facility in an unknown country), Maverick is called to be an instructor for a group of talented "top gun" pilots. Although Tom Cruise looks almost exactly the same as he did in the original film, this new assignment has him revisit his own history while discovering how time has passed and a new, younger generation of pilots is eager for their own "top gun" flight adventures and missions. While Maverick attempts to show the top gun class that they are not quite ready for the mission, he has to teach a group of "know it alls" that they don't quite know it all. When Iceman, a pilot who he went to top gun school with in the original film passes away (who is now an admiral and provides political cover for Maverick in this film) , Maverick gets pulled from the mission in favor of a more regimented "by the book" instructor until Maverick shows the group and new instructor that the flight can be done by flying it himself. Ultimately for the mission itself, Maverick flies lead in the mission, which is successful until he attempts to save "Rooster", the son of Goose from the original movie, and in saving rooster (who ran out of flares), Maverick is shot down and engaged by an enemy helicopter. Ultimately Rooster saves Maverick by shooting down the helicopter after being ordered to return to the aircraft carrier, and Maverick and Rooster must high jack one of the enemy's grounded planes until they are nearly shot down on their return to the ship. One of the challenges in this movie is the fact that the "enemy" in the movie is more technologically advanced than the American planes and therefore the American pilots have to rely more on skill than the technological advantage. Another interesting aspect of the movie is that the "enemy" country is unknown and no flags or any other identifying country was seen, just a generic enemy. Considering the place that Top Gun, and now Top Gun Maverick have in the American movie and cultural history, these two themes (play an outsized role in that America is struggling in a world where we can no longer entirely count on superior technological and economic advantage, and that there are more "enemies" which in the film could have been China, Russia, or Iran but instead was a generic enemy. This movie is a great, fast speed film in which most of the scenes are up in the air shots of the high speed flights or in the cockpit looking at the pilots face while the scenery disappears behind them. My favorite part of the movie is how ultimately Maverick shows the younger generation how he's still got it.