The opinions expressed in The Lawrentian are those of the students, faculty and community members who wrote them. The Lawrentian does not endorse any opinions piece except for the staff editorial, which represents a majority of the editorial board. The Lawrentian welcomes everyone to submit their own opinions. For the full editorial policy and parameters for submitting articles, please refer to the about section.
“Top Gun: Maverick” wound up being the second-highest grossing movie of last year, netting around one and a half billion dollars at the box office and representing a return to form for mass-appeal blockbuster cinema in a post-COVID world. Since its outstanding theatrical run, it has been nominated for multiple awards, including a nomination for Best Picture and a win for Best Sound at the Oscars. I don’t deny that the movie is well made, and hand-wringing about military propaganda in the movies has been done to death at this point, but this film in particular has one key feature – or omission – that has some nasty implications; that feature being its conspicuous lack of a villain.
To illustrate exactly what I mean, I first want to talk briefly about a different movie. Red Dawn is a classic military propaganda piece, released in 1984, seven years before the end of the Cold War. It follows a group of Colorado teenagers who fight to take back their town after a military invasion by the Soviets. It’s not a very good movie, but it does present a couple of redeeming things: a clear villain, and a clear set of stakes. Within the logic of the film, war is presented as a means to an end. Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen must fight, or suffer the brutal tyranny imposed on them by the evil communist government.
“Top Gun: Maverick,” by contrast, follows Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, the protagonist of the original “Top Gun” movie, as he attempts to train a batch of new recruits for an elite military pilot school called Top Gun in preparation for a dangerous mission to destroy a uranium plant. Whose uranium plant? I have no idea. People have theorized that it could be Iran’s, North Korea’s or Russia’s, but the film itself only refers to them as “The Enemy.” Why must this plant be destroyed? You could theorize about preventing “someone” from gaining weapons of mass destruction, but within the context of the film, it doesn’t matter. The consequences for failing this mission, as presented by the film, are that the military disbands the Top Gun program and starts using drone pilots. Its central conflict is character-based between Maverick and his student Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, who blames Maverick for the death of his father in the original film. In the third act, they resolve their differences by escaping “enemy” territory and fighting “enemy” planes in the sky together. Not a single named character dies throughout the entirety of the movie except for Maverick’s old friend Iceman, who dies offscreen from cancer. In this war movie, the actual warfare is completely incidental.
The reason I choose to highlight this is due to the nature of war. War is bad! In every instance throughout the entirety of human history, it has been bad. People are killed, maimed, displaced and made to endure unthinkable traumas as a consequence. Most world leaders agree that war should be avoided at all costs. When we look to American history, the only wars that we look back on with reverence were ones where the cost of not engaging in warfare was so great that we had no other choice, whether that was to free ourselves from the British Empire, to stop Southern secession and end slavery or to stop the advance of fascism across Europe and the Pacific. Even in these instances, where the outcomes were ultimately good, the wars themselves were massive tragedies. War is not something to be taken lightly, and I feel that even Red Dawn understands this. The war it presents, despite its propagandistic nature, is still presented as a means to an end. The plucky Colorado boys would not be fighting if not for the intolerable threat of the Soviet invasion, and the fighting only serves to end this invasion and restore freedom and peace to their small town.
I understand the reasons why “Top Gun: Maverick” may have avoided this. I could see an argument that choosing to present a particular nation as the villain in a film of this scale could have angered members of that nation, or driven up xenophobia among us Americans. I understand the writer’s desire to shift focus away from the specific global politics of any particular point in history to instead create a timeless story about universal values like courage and camaraderie. I’m just not convinced that a war film needs to be scrubbed clean of all political and historical context in order to do this. The alternative this film presents is a somewhat bleak reflection of modern day warfare in the United States.
For Maverick, going to battle is just another day at work. It doesn’t matter who he’s fighting or why; if he fails his mission, people might die or be put in danger. Still, an even greater evil may occur: his Top Gun program will be shut down. If he succeeds, people might be safer, but more importantly, he can make peace with his dead friend’s son. War is a matter of course, a simple fact of life, a career choice. And if you’re good enough at it, it can further your own self-actualization. In the modern age of the United States Military Industrial Complex™ and the never ending war against “our enemies,” “Top Gun: Maverick” presents a new kind of military propaganda film — one that teaches us to accept constant warfare as a matter of course, and to be completely indifferent to its human cost.