OPENING NIGHT: The moment we've all been waiting for... Maverick: Top Gun is in theaters now!

The sequel of the popular 80’s blockbuster Top Gun with Tom Cruise opened in theaters today. Directed by Joseph Kosinski, Top Gun: Maverick is everything fans wanted the long-awaited film to be—and more!

The original film, Top Gun, was released in 1986, smashing the box office and becoming an iconic 80’s movie. Following the original’s footsteps, Maverick has already received countless positive reviews and is set to become the blockbuster of 2022.

During its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, the movie received a 5-minute standing ovation. Similarly, on Rotten Tomatoes, the film received a 97% Tomatometer score, which represents the reviews of the film by professional critics, and a 99% audience score—both incredibly high scores for a movie. 

“The jet-fueled sequel to the 1986 flyboy classic has charisma to burn, soaring airplane indulgences, and a narrative that honors the past while breaking the sound barrier as it shifts to the future,” wrote Thelma Adams, a movie critic. 

“Top Gun: Maverick is just the full-throttle blast of hotshot flyboy fun we need right now. Has it really been 36 years since the blockbusting Top Gun made Cruise a star? You wouldn’t know to look at him. Pushing 60, Cruise is still pushing the limits of stamina, doing risky stunts with his star shine intact,” said ABC News film critic Pete Travers. 

“The filmmakers have crafted the kind of impossibly fast, high-altitude rollercoaster sequences that will have you leaning back in your cinema seat as if your own weight might be able to push the planes over the mountaintops they're skimming. And again, these sequences are far superior to the ones shot for the first film. Even Tom's teeth are better than they were in 1986,” Nicholas Barber wrote about the movie for BBC. 

“The three screenwriters of Top Gun: Maverick — including Cruise's regular Mission: Impossible writer-director, Christopher McQuarrie — have taken the threads of the original and spun them into an intergenerational male weepie, a dad movie of truly epic proportions. They're tapping into nostalgia for the original, while aiming for new levels of emotional grandeur,” wrote Justin Chang for NPR. 

In the film, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell—played by Tom Cruise—is called back to the Top Gun flight academy to teach the new recruits how to save the world. There they face an impossible mission: to beat their enemy. 

“Even as a viewer with no special attachment to the original Top Gun—which I recall dismissing at the time as a piece of middlingly entertaining patriotic kitsch—I found myself tearing up near the end of Top Gun: Maverick,” wrote Dana Stevens in her review for Slate. 

The film has also been praised as a perfect sequel because it rises above politics and social commentary and provides pure fun for anyone watching it. “No hand wringing over military might or extended emasculation of its rugged hero, for starters. No lectures on America’s imperfect past or gender inequality,” write Christian Toto in his review. 

The movie is currently in theaters.