Way late to this but I finally got around to seeing the movie. Really liked it and so did my wife. It had enough of the Original scenes in it to elicit the nostalgia and identify it as clearly "Top Gun" without the mindless sellout nonsense of Star Wars Episode VII.
The mission reminded me of every installment of Ace Combat games since I started playing them on PS1 back when I was a kid, but themselves pull from the infamous trench run from Star Wars. As corny as that is I think it was pulled off nicely and those ridiculous missions were always the most fun in AC.
Totally missed Penny being the Admiral's daughter. Nice way to bring a love interest back without "Charlie".
The air to air scenes were meh. But a lot of the things they didn't get right are things only 2% of the audience would even notice anyhow and didn't really matter. Was cool to see the old ATFLIR I used to work on used in the movie. They even used the right button on the throttle.
Air to air scenes always look terrible because there is no continutiy as to what is going on. 99.5% of the audience wouldn't be able to put it together even if there was, so I understand the lack of effort but I wish there was a little more. They could have made the scenes even more interesting and less predictable.
Overall, though, I knew what I was getting into and they delivered exactly that. Awesome movie and one of few sequels fully deserving of the original movie.
We watched the original afterwards and my god, between having aged myself well beyond the age he was in that movie and after seeing him now, if Tom Cruise doesn't look like a child!
Now my wife is calling me Goose and her wingman.