Hollywood movies trivialize tragedy all the time, from world wars to 9/11 to the specter of American racism. That’s an impossibly horrific and profound human tragedy “Top Gun: Maverick” is just a summer movie. So yes, Russia was very much part of the first “Top Gun.” It was deliberately left out of the second “Top Gun,” but reality had another idea. That’s also part of why critics didn’t like it. That was part of its package, part of what gave the flyboy action its righteous zeitgeist edge. But it was also a movie that made a point of mirroring the Reagan administration’s ratcheting up of Cold War tensions. Sure, Tony Scott’s film was a joystick popcorn combat thriller, with speed and bravado and rivalry and occasionally homoerotic male bonding at its core. Now it’s the living epicenter of global conflict.īut why does “Maverick” invoking NATO automatically invoke Russia? For that, you have to connect one more dot: the original “Top Gun.” That movie climaxed with a battle against Russian MiGs. The alliance was always vital (even as some argued that it had become irrelevant). But the meaning of NATO, since the war in Ukraine began, has changed. That seems - or must have seemed, when “Maverick” started shooting four years ago - like a relatively safe sphere of actuality for the movie to invoke. The Top Gun team is on a mission to protect NATO. But to root the film in something that resembles the real world, they slip in one telltale word: NATO. In “Maverick,” no one says the word “Russia.” On the contrary, it’s obvious that the filmmakers were bending over backwards to make the whole standoff as politically neutral and non-topical as possible. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is training an elite squadron to attack a weapons site - basically a hole in the ground they have to zoom under the radar and bomb with pinpoint precision, much as the heroes of “Star Wars,” in 1977, had to target a rare vulnerable spot in the Death Star to blow the thing to smithereens. It’s Vladimir Putin’s Russia.Īll you need to do is connect a few dots. Yet you can feel it as you watch the movie, lurking in the shadows. The filmmakers didn’t even know about it. Of course, what good would an action movie be - one that’s all about the interface of 19 - if it didn’t also have a great villain? “Top Gun: Maverick” has one.
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