I'm not going to complain about acting or CGI here, it didn't fail in those departments, although it didn't wow me either. For me, the reason this movie fell short, and the reason I glazed over at least 20 minutes skipping at different points, was because the movie tried for too much, in too little time.
It aimed too high for emotionalism, sentimentality, failure/success, soldier camaraderie, love, loss, life lessons, moral of a story, rivalry and of course, painting the fighter jets in a flattering light, all in the span of 2 hours. The issue with that is it doesn't work. Movies with that much content and that many characters, have, at bare minimum, sequels, or more commonly now, trilogies and even rarely whole sagas (e.g Fast and Furious) in which they build up their characters (especially their main character/s) and all the relationships around them with feeling and over time.

Even as a fan of WY, I was once again left not actually feeling bad for his character when he went through hardship, especially because he went through so many separate instances of hardship in 40 minutes and then there was no time for character development or feeling to set in before someone (of forced) 'importance' died, and we sat through several minutes of funeral stuff for this guy and then some other stuff, and then time skip, Lei Yu healed and boom, he goes back, says a line, and he's one of the guys and they're all best friends. They hadn't even been much of friends to start with.

Nah, nah. Not for me. I need to actually care about at least ONE character, and I can't do that if a movie shoves ten main characters in my face in 2 hours. Ten main characters in a ten episode long series? Sure, it can be done. Ten main characters in a movie or book franchise spanning several installations? Yep. But in 2 hours? Nope.
Best to keep it tidy, have at most 2 main characters, some support roles, and easy on the 'big moving moments' so they actually have some impact. Anyway;

THE (generally) GOOD:
- I don't personally care for CGI being perfect, as long as it's watchable, this was watchable.
- Acting was fine, although the scenes went by far too quickly to really allow any acting to resonate or stand out.
- There was some humor here and there, which landed nicely, except again, went by too fast, lost in the scenes changing to accommodate all the stuff going on.
- I liked the bird strike scene, it was probably the high point of the movie for me if I have to choose one.

THE (generally) BAD:
- Unmemorable movie over all. I ended up skipping the filler between scenes and even the last fighting scene, I didn't care about a single character and I wouldn't recc this to anyone. Not even Top Gun or Army movie fans.
- I don't think this movie actually had a plot, or if it did, it was weak sauce. Lost in translation, too much excess dialogue about stuff and things that I barely remember.
- Quite a few parallels to the latest Top Gun movie, which achieved a high pay off in 2 hours, but lets not forget, it's the second film released as a highly anticipated sequel to a movie that is a long standing classic and Maverick is an established, well liked character. Lei Yu, with so many other 'mains' in need of screen time and attention, was barely allowed to be interesting.

Nothing ugly here, but nothing worth reccing either. As a person who enjoys military theme movies, this wasn't particularly entertaining. I haven't fallen asleep during a movie since Blade Runner 2017, but this movie had me feeling sleepy.