A.O. SCOTT Even though some of our readers have questioned my credibility as a film critic, I’m not sorry I waited so long to see “Top Gun” for the first time. Back when I was a 20-year-old undergraduate film snob, I might not have been as susceptible to its charms or as tolerant of its limitations. Seen through middle-aged eyes, the movie takes on an extra glow of nostalgia, and also looks much stranger than it might have on a night out at the multiplex in 1986.

I’m intrigued by how divisive it still is, based on the comments we’ve received. They range from “What a bunch of hooey” to “landmark of cinematic excellence.” The glorification of the American military was inspiring to some, off-putting to others. One reader, Cheryl from Fullerton, Calif., remembered that “30 years ago this film blew me away” only to find it “trite, misogynistic and actually boring” when she rewatched it with her grandsons.

That a movie so well known can provoke such divergent responses after so many years is a sign that it’s still alive. I have no doubt that we’ll get into the sexual politics and the homoerotic … can we even call it a subtext? There are a lot of themes to unpack!

But what struck me — what I didn’t expect — was the extravagant beauty, the dreaminess, the foregrounding of poetry rather than plot. I expected something more like the action movies I’m used to reviewing: a violent, overblown spectacle of aggression. Not anything so deliciously campy and sincerely silly. Those wide-screen compositions! That sand and surf! Those flight sequences! The rippling torsos and smooth faces! It made me feel young again, and also ancient.

As a teen in the 1980s, I ate this up. It’s hard to tell whether it was the nostalgia propelling the smiles and cheers as I watched it with teens of my own. But they ate it up, too, so there must be something here. Yes, the romance is implausible, but at least Kelly McGillis’s character has a brain. — S. Trainor, Bethesda, MD

DARGIS Rippling, glistening muscles have rarely been so lovingly photographed. If nothing else, I hope that our viewing party inspires those skeptical about the director Tony Scott to revisit his work. For better or worse — and I’m a longtime partisan — Scott was a visual maximalist who embraced delirious excesses. He started out in advertising (like his brother, Ridley), a background that shaped his style and meant that he could, with economy and beauty, convey a movie’s meaning in images and often better than the boneheaded dialogue.