Credit: Scott Garfield / Paramount Pictures

Top Gun: Maverick should have been a terrible idea: there, we said it. Come on, a sequel arriving 36 years after the original, with Tom Cruise back in Pete Mitchell’s flight suit, had the whiff of Hollywood reaching for an old hit because it knew the name would still sell. Yet somehow, Joseph Kosinski got it right by making Maverick older and not picking where he left off. He still has the swagger, sure, but nobody is pretending 1986 was yesterday.

Netflix brought Top Gun: Maverick back on its US catalogue on September 22nd, and it took only five days to make its way back to number two on the movie chart. For a movie that first came in cinemas back in 2022, that is a pretty healthy second wind.

And if you are wondering what’s with all the hype, you see, Maverick understands something plenty of blockbusters forget: enormous machinery means very little if nobody inside it matters to you.

This time, Maverick returns to TOPGUN to train a group of elite graduates for a mission against a fortified uranium facility. Among them is Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), and there is history here before either man says much. Rooster is the son of Goose, Maverick’s late wingman, and he has spent years believing Maverick held back his naval career. So now Maverick has to train the son of the friend whose death has never stopped following him. Believe us, awkward does not begin to cover it.

That relationship is what keeps the film from becoming two hours of expensive aircraft doing random impressive things. Maverick wants to keep Rooster safe, but that is part of the problem, because Rooster sees all that protection as one more way Maverick has been deciding his life for him.

And really, can you blame him? Rooster resents Maverick for holding back his career, while Maverick sees Goose every time he looks at him. And now they are meant to trust each other? Yeah, that was never going to be simple. So when those two finally have to work together, you already know there is far too much history between them.

Cruise put the cast through an intensive training programme before filming them inside F/A-18s flown by Navy pilots, so when those bodies are being shoved back into their seats, much of what you are seeing is real G-force at work.

The gamble paid off as well. Paramount reported more than $1.5 billion in worldwide box office, making Maverick the studio’s highest-grossing film, and the Academy gave it six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. It went home with Best Sound.

So, really not bad for a sequel nobody was crying out for after 36 years.

Maverick never assumes that people loved Top Gun, and thus, never takes it for granted. The callbacks are there, of course, but there also is a man discovering that age has not cancelled his debts.

So, is anyone really surprised Top Gun: Maverick is trending on Netflix again? In all fairness, there are so many blockbusters that disappear from conversations once the publicity dies down, but this one still has enough cachet to make people come back four years later.

Thirty-six years for the sequel, four years to circle back on Netflix… and Maverick still won’t stay on the ground.