Top Gun: Maverick may have earned an astronomical $1.3 billion at the box office, but some moviegoers remain underwhelmed by the summer blockbuster.
In the r/movies subreddit, Between3N20Karakters panned the film, describing the plot as banal and chalking its success up to ridiculous boomer sentimentality.
Apparently, the author of the post failed to read the room as their comment received a grand total of zero upvotes. However, scores of Redditors vigorously challenged the post in the comments and expressed their genuine love of the film. Many found it brash and disingenuous to overlook the merits of Top Gun: Maverick by reducing it to a facile trip down memory lane by aging film fans.
BranWafr explained that their children were initially uninterested in watching the movie but decided to see what all the fuss was about and were pleasantly surprised.
Grumpus_Dad was considerably less gracious with their rejoinder.
Others were in favor of ditching the boomer and millennial stereotypes altogether. Bocephus8892 felt that the film accomplished this quite well.
While the original post received no upvotes, some Redditors could relate to the gap in how different generations view the film. Frosted Flakes1971 thought the movie was sufficiently entertaining and didn’t see a problem with the dewy-eyed delight of older moviegoers.
At the end of the day, Between3N20Karakters wasn’t entirely alone in their antipathy for the movie. Another Redditor doubled down on the assertion that the sequel was pretentious and claimed the same could be said of its star, Tom Cruise.
It’s clear that Top Gun: Maverick holds a special place in the hearts of many moviegoers. Whether it’s solely because of nostalgia and patriotism is debatable, considering the technical strengths of the film. For example, many found the flying sequences absolutely breathtaking. Moreover, Cruise remains a genre-defining action star, and it’s hard not to be impressed that at 60 years old, he still has the grit and daring to masterfully perform his own spectacular stunts.
Top Gun: Maverick is currently in theaters.