The second-best naval aviation movie of 2022 overstays its welcome and dispels the myth of meritocracy on streaming

On May 27, 2022, Top Gun: Maverick released to cinemas, and proceeded to nab almost $1.5 billion at the box office, get its ego inflated by just about every critic and awards body in sight, and receive the unofficial honor of Movie Theater Jesus for getting people back into cinemas after COVID-19 nearly rattled the market beyond repair.

A healthy moviegoing economy is of course a welcome development in most any context, but the dark side of this is that sometimes the movies that everyone goes to see aren’t actually that good. Perhaps this makes Maverick‘s many achievements all the more impressive, though; it’s a bad movie that believes so unwaveringly that it’s a good movie, that it tricked the entire world into believing that as well, all the way to the people who choose the Oscar nominees for Best Picture. And even now, people can’t keep their eyes off it.

Per FlixPatrol, Top Gun: Maverick continues to soar in second place on the Paramount Plus charts in the United States at the time of writing, continuing its 669-day charting streak while exceeding the likes of Gladiator (seventh place), Transformers One (eighth place) and Smile 2 (third place).

Set over 30 years after the original Top Gun, Maverick follows the plight of one Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a Navy Captain whose last lease on military life comes in the form of a teaching job at Top Gun, where he’s to train a group of young fighter pilots for a dangerous mission. One of these pilots is Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, the son of Maverick’s deceased best friend and radar intercept officer Nick, and who inadvertently forces Maverick to confront his demons.

Folks, let me give it to you straight; if the creative storytelling instincts of Top Gun: Maverick took place in absolutely any other film, that film would skate to the finish line with a 40 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and get slapped with many a poetically-rendered anecdote about its lack of inspiration. The set pieces are entirely in service to themselves rather than the contrived emotional core that the characters dance around with vaguely connected revelations about doing what needs to be done, and the dialogue literally tells us when we’re supposed to think Maverick is a badass, as well as when something good or bad happens during the mission.

Combine that with catchphrases for the sake of catchphrases, callbacks for the sake of callbacks, and gratuitous orchestra flourishes that let us know when we’re supposed to feel inspired or emotional, and it becomes thoroughly amazing that Top Gun: Maverick got to where it did on a cultural level.

If you want to watch a naval aviation movie that actually respects its audience and soars on genuine emotion rather than contrived ego, go and queue up Devotion, the 2022 biographical war drama based on the friendship between Korean War veterans Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner. Jonathan Majors’ presence in the lead role may be a turn off for some, given his new and not-improved real-life reputation, but if you can look beyond that, an enrichingly humanist tale awaits. The kicker? It’s also on Paramount Plus.