I mean, if you REALLY want to criticize, the real question is: why wouldn’t you send drones or stealth aircraft to do this job? IIRC they gave a reason in the movie (I forget already) but I found it unsatisfactory. You could also send large numbers of cruise missiles to saturate the air defense blanket.
Ultimately though, it’s a pretty good movie. It’s probably the best third act of an action movie you’ll ever see, and they used the training bits to prepare the audience for that third act. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of random short cut together clips of airplanes. But the training gives the audience the context to string them together in a narrative.
My problem with the movie though is that I thought the character stories were all weak. The Rooster subplot was a great idea, but poorly executed and the actor they chose for Rooster did a poor job. We should have spent more time on this and gotten a better actor for the role…and not given him that silly moustache.
We wasted time on a romantic subplot that felt shoe-horned into the movie (though to be fair, the original’s romance subplot was also shoe-horned). The prologue with the speed test was a pointless waste of time. The Iceman callback was classy….but did it really add anything to the narrative? And does having Maverick as a 60 year old teenager who still disrespects authority really make any sense?
I think these subplots all should have been dumped except Rooster. We should have given that more time to breathe and added something where Mav became a family man and maybe became too cushy…lost his edge. And suddenly he need to rediscover it because of Rooster.
I’d also have liked more time given to the random assortment of pilots we barely met. Why not make me care about some of them as they die on the mission? They’re just cardboard cutouts.
Also…I think mav should have died. Maybe not as early as the SAM attack, when he got shot down, but later while fighting the 5th gens. But that moment when Maverick SEEMED to have died…even though I kind of knew they wouldn’t have the balls to do it…that was emotional A.F. Imagine that sacrifice, but while battling the 5th gen fighters. In F-18 super hornets, not in the tomcats. The entire tomcat thing…yeah, okay, I get why that was fan service, but honestly….not necessary and kind of undermined the realism.
But overall, good movie with an OUTSTANDING third act.