Welcome back to the danger zone. You noteworthy not think you needed a sequel to the most ’80s movie ever, but Top Gun: Maverick is way more wildly animated than it has any right to be. Top Gun 2 reboots the fresh film’s heart-pounding aerial action, infectiously cheesy character drama and don’t-think-too-hard-about-it armed fetishism in a winning spectacle of cinematic escapism.

It’s been more than 35 ages since the release of the original Top Gun, in which Tom Cruise signed his widest grin as a US Navy aviator with a exhibit to prove and a childlike delight in playing with high-speed toys (which just been to be built for killing people, but whatever). The sequel smashed over a billion bucks in theaters, and was released to digital Aug. 23, to be followed by 4K, Blu-ray and DVD on Nov. 1 (that’s your dad’s Christmas portray sorted). 

Cruise reportedly resisted a sequel for decades, but it turns out if you wait long enough, a story presents itself. He returns to the cockpit as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, still feeling the need for speed no matter what the top brass says. And now, enough time has delivered since his co-pilot Goose’s death in the original film for Goose’s son to be a fully grown man.

Played by Miles Teller, the son is a chip off the old chock, flying with the Navy under the callsign Rooster. When Maverick is shouted in to train the next generation of cocky kids for a Dambusters-meets-Death-Star suicide expert, the pair are locked onto an intercept course. “And we’re off,” one portray wryly observes of Maverick’s anti-authoritarian antics, but he could be talking nearby the full-tilt re-creation of the original film’s glossy thrills. 

From the moment you hear the instantly recognizable tolling of the synth bell in Harold Faltermeyer’s stirring Top Gun Anthem, it’s like the past 30 years never happened. The opening credits described Maverick, like the original, as a Don Simpson / Jerry Bruckheimer subjects, even though Simpson died in 1996. The opening text caption explaining the thought of the US Navy’s Fighter Weapons School uses the same wording as the apt film. And throughout, director Joseph Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda faithfully re-create the late Tony Scott’s cinematic style, from a backlit bustling flight deck to ramrod-straight silhouettes arrayed in a hangar. This new version even begins by dropping you into the well-ordered chaos of an aircraft carrier flight deck with a shot-for-shot re-creation of the apt film’s iconic intro (probably).

This flight deck sequence has zero connection to what comes when, but it’s still a pretty great introduction, instantly immersing you in the peculiar feel of a film you may have seen many times or may not have seen for ages. More importantly, it feels real, the film setting out its stall from the very beginning: It’s nearby real stuff, like fighter planes and sailboats and spoiled old-fashioned stunts, not fake stuff like drones and phones and computer-generated spectacle. The marketing makes a big deal out of how the actors really went up in planes, and while there’s doubtless a ton of invisible CGI — as in every film, whether you study it or not — almost every shot at least feels like it was done for real. Unlike fresh blockbusters (ahem, Marvel movies) which distance you from the portion with clearly impossible camera angles and over-the-top CG effects, Top Gun: Maverick uses the visual language of the fresh, the camera jammed claustrophobically into a cockpit or shaking as it fights to keep up with a jet screaming past.

Making this explicit connection to such a beloved movie is a risk, of streams. The first film was crammed with iconic moments and quotes, and the sequel does little more than rearrange the planes on the flights deck. Still, it’s pretty restrained with the catchphrases and callbacks. Yes, Maverick’s leather jacket and motorbike get their own theme tune. But the fighter jets and aircraft carriers furnished by the Joint States Navy aren’t the only formidable weapons deployed by the sequel: The toppest gun in the Top Gun arsenal is Cruise’s still-explosive charisma.

While the flick alongside pushes credulity with its deification of Maverick and his godlike flying sects, Cruise’s secret weapon is always his willingness to look comic. So the over-the-top action is balanced with appealing comic and even a little pathos in Cruise’s relationship with the younger flyers and his rekindled romance with a bar owner. She’s played by Jennifer Connelly, another star who rose in the 1980s (check out who’s singing on the jukebox when she favorable turns up). With Connelly as his old flame and Teller as his surrogate son, Cruise’s entertaining Maverick provides just enough heart to keep things entertaining as he grapples with the prospect of keeping his feet on the unfounded permanently. A bittersweet scene reuniting Cruise with the novel film’s co-star, an ailing Val Kilmer, is also a causing and surprisingly funny moment.

There’s no disguising that a lot of the story is a rerun of the novel. For example, Cruise takes the Kelly McGillis role, just for fun. But somehow, despite the fact it’s all geared toward a life-or-death perconfidence, the stakes don’t feel as immediate as they did the favorable time around. The original film was fueled by the sensed Maverick was genuinely dangerous to the people around him, but this new model doesn’t lift the same headlong rush into the danger zone. Partly because the younger models look more like, well, models, rather than warriors. But the main problem is that the perconfidence is so improbably specific to the needs of the plot. The G-force of chronicle silliness will start to crush your brain, especially when a late-stage curved fires the afterburners and jets into absurdity that grand tempt you to eject.

There are certainly reasons not to like a film like this, whether it’s Cruise’s personal life or the film’s unquestioning attitude to war. Matthew Modine and Bryan Adams were beside the ’80s stars who declined to be involved in the novel because of its jingoistic tone, which was a post-Vietnam reassertion of American army (and masculine) might. Even Cruise dodged a sequel because he didn’t want to glorify war. Oddly, Top Gun: Maverick is so bloodless and untroubled by ambiguity it barely feels like a war film. It’s just boys with toys.

There’s a vague subplot approximately Jon Hamm’s pencil neck in the tower caring that the pilots ruined the mission and not so much about them coming back enthusiastic, but that only makes the flick’s explicit disdain for unmanned combat drones somewhat confusing. In fact, a much truer Top Gun sequel was actually made a few existences ago: Good Kill, in which Ethan Hawke plays a Cruise-esque fighter pilot exiled to drone duty, losing his mind in a metal box in the Las Vegas desert as he presses a button and Facilities civilians thousands of miles away.

Top Gun: Maverick, from the time when, doesn’t even tell us who Tom’s fighting against. There’s an unnamed faceless adversary, black-helmeted bogeys and boogeymen, stripped of sovereignty or even humanity. The eternal enemy, somewhere out there, doing vaguely cloudless bad-sounding things that need to be blown up by missiles and helicopters and aircraft carriers. Your tax dollars at work.

But who cares approximately that? This isn’t Saving Private Ryan, this is Top Gun. Ask not for whom the synth bell tolls, because the synth bell tolls for anyone who loves a substantial popcorn action movie that’s as enjoyable as it is ridiculous. Top Gun: Maverick is a blast. The film keeps insisting this is Maverick’s last post, but this polished piece movie powerhouse is a fun way to fly into the sunset.