It's an average movie , it's just most movies are so bad these days

It not only has amazing practical effects, it has soul. It would be great in any time period.

But thanks for the Mandatory Contrarian™ post here.

Saw this yesterday and I would not say it was average. I wouldn't say it was 'number 56 on the IMDB top 250 good' either but it was definitely very enjoyable and done extremely well. It's at least a 7 or 8 out of 10. In terms of it being a sequel to a fairly average cheesy 80's flick where I never felt it had the leg room to be anything more than a run of the mill follow on, I give it a 10 out of 10. I'm still amazed they found such a formula to make this as big a hit as it is with what it had to work with. Bravo to them.

perhaps

For over a hundred years, a movie just needs a few moments. Maverick delivers on that front. There's the sequence where he's flying the Darkstar. Some people like Ed Harris standing still as the jet zooms by. Others report "chills" when Maverick says "Talk to me, Goose" (corny). There's the diner where a kid tells him where he's landed (and other comedic/character touches before that). And that's just the first major sequence.

There's the meeting with Ice. The speed run, which is like a video game. The football sequence to show off hardbodies. I was most impressed with how they shoehorned the F-14 into the narrative. It's absurd, but perfect nostalgia porn. Rooster has to eject them or they're dead. They had over thirty years to come up with these scenes, and then did a pretty good job connecting them. It's exceptionally well-made for any era.

I've seen many films pay homage to one thing or another, but I've never seen an entire film spend it's entire time paying homage to its entire predecessor.

Having watched it a few times now, I find it fairly boring. There isn't much actual action in it. Once you strip away the nostalgia, it's a lot of characters sitting around talking and flying the same the same flight routine over and over again. Then we get some nice action in the end, which is just a better captured version of what we've seen many times before. But then we get that just ludicrous tacked on ending from where it feels like we're an watching Iron Eagle homage. It undercut the seriousness of the rest of the film. I think i'll appreciate it a lot more when I see all the behind the scenes making of stuff. I know they put a ton of effort into shooting real actors in real planes and all, but I wasn't really seeing it. But yeah, i'd say this is probably the best produced average movie i've ever seen. Which I guess is an accomplishment. At least they had a script. Hopefully it finally makes a proper movie star out of Miles Teller.

The baseline is definitely much lower nowadays.

It has a lot to do with having a big shortage of movies this year. Trickle down from covid.