Why Top Gun: Maverick is Great for the U.S. Military

 

Toward the end of the credits sequence in Top Gun: Maverick, a message reads, “Special Thanks to the United States Department of Defense.” But really, it should be the other way around — the DOD should be the one saying thank you.

After the original Top Gun was released in 1986, the U.S. Navy saw a 500% increase in the number of people joining to be naval aviators. In fact, the Navy quite literally ran recruitment booths in some of the theaters showing the film, and in the years since, it has been one of the organization’s most effective recruitment tools.

Thirty-six years later, with the release of Top Gun: Maverick, the same playbook is being used again. Both the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force have had recruitment booths inside movie theaters for the film’s premiere, and at least some theaters have quite literally played commercials for the Air Force during the previews for Top Gun: Maverick.

The connection goes even deeper, though. It’s an open secret in Hollywood that war films like Top Gun can’t get made without direct approval from the Film Liaison Office of the U.S. government’s Department of Defense. Are you a producer making a movie that will have tanks, artillery, or Army helicopters in it? Well, one of the only places you can get them is directly from the military. The larger your movie is, the fewer other options you have; for a small-scale movie like John Wick that only uses guns and cars, you can probably film it with a Hollywood production studio. But in the case of Top Gun, you’ll need sophisticated fighter jets, highly skilled pilots, and several days of shooting on a real aircraft carrier. Not exactly things you’ll find tucked away in a closet on the Paramount studio lot.

So, you’re making Top Gun: Maverick, and you need to borrow jets and an aircraft carrier from the Department of Defense. They’re kind enough to lend them to you and have the taxpayers foot the bill, but there’s a catch: the DOD has the final say on the script. If there’s a line of dialogue they don’t like or a character that makes the military look bad, you’ll either have to rewrite the movie or find someone else who owns an aircraft carrier.

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This is not a hypothetical scenario: this is the reality of working with the Pentagon’s Film Liaison Office. We know that Top Gun: Maverick went through this very process because we know that the movie was filmed on at least two real, active-duty U.S. Navy aircraft carriers. One was the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, soon after it returned from a

deployment to the Middle East in 2019, and the other was the $4.5 billion U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, which saw its first combat during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991. This relationship, where the U.S. military lends crucial equipment in exchange for the power to rewrite the film’s script, is why Hollywood war films overwhelmingly tend to be “patriotic” and pro-military.

Avoiding Discussion of Politics and Focusing Only on Individuals

One of the hallmarks of contemporary Hollywood war stories is that they are (or, at least, attempt to be) totally divorced from political or historical realities. Gone are the lengthy attempts to explain and justify why the U.S. has marched off to war and gone are the hoo-rah speeches about freedom and equality. Because the United States has in the last half century found itself in quite a bit of trouble for its overseas involvements, such as the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, modern war films depict their wars as vaguely as possible and leave the underlying context simply unexplained.

Top Gun: Maverick is a textbook example of this. The film centers around the training of an elite squad of fighter pilots for a bombing mission on a foreign country’s nuclear facility. We are never told how this attack is morally justified, why it’s necessary, or even what country they’re bombing—the country is referred to in dialogue only as “a rogue state.” Details of any kind are extremely scant: Is the U.S. at war with this other country? What is this nuclear facility used for? What geographical region does the attack take place in? Does the international community support the attack? What is the world’s reaction after the attack? Does the country retaliate and start a war? None of these questions are answered.

Top Gun: Maverick and other modern Hollywood war films are able to sidestep these moral or political issues by focusing only on individual soldiers. To illustrate the difference, consider two war movies: the old Midway (1976) is about the Battle of Midway, the head admirals of the U.S. and Japanese Navies, grand strategy, freedom, racism, and the forces that shaped WWII. On the other hand, the more recent Saving Private Ryan (1998) is about a small group of soldiers who perform no acts of real significance to the war, and it gives no justification for or large-scale view of WWII.

Likewise, Top Gun: Maverick is a story of a few fighter pilots who go on one single mission, the significance of which is never explained, and about their relationships with each other. It’s not a story about a war or even a mission. It’s a story about a few individuals who happen to be soldiers.

Soldiers Demonstrate Extreme Heroism and Skill

In what can more directly be called propaganda, Top Gun: Maverick depicts U.S. soldiers as heroes on a scale comparable to the best figures from Greek mythology. Maverick (Tom Cruise) is so selfless that he almost feels cartoonish. In the movie's opening, he sacrifices his entire career by attempting the Mach 10 test flight against orders just so that the flight program won’t be shut down and his coworkers won’t lose their jobs. During combat, the pilots repeatedly risk their lives in order to save their comrades in shows of extreme heroism and selflessness.

Throughout the movie, we are constantly reminded that U.S. fighter pilots are the best in the world — and the members of Top Gun are the best of the best. If you got a nickel every time someone on the screen said “the best in the world,” you’d easily make back the price of your ticket. To drive it home even more, the movie also constantly reminds us that the enemy has far more sophisticated planes but that the Top Gun pilots are so incredibly skilled they’ll still prevail. Is it any surprise that these qualities are so prominently placed in the script when the Department of Defense had final approval?

An Emphasis on Camaraderie, Friendship, and Honor

In addition to heroism and skill, the pilots in Top Gun: Maverick have a near-religious devotion to the principles of camaraderie. Maverick devotes all his time as a mission planner and teacher to ensure not that the mission gets completed but that every pilot makes it home safely. This leads to several

 arguments with his superior, who simply wants to make sure the mission is completed, no matter the costs. The over-the-top emphasis on camaraderie and saving one’s brother-in-arms gives life (and the taking of life) a clear and powerful purpose. This is one of the most effective ways Top Gun: Maverick and films like it convince young men that they should leave the theater and join the Navy immediately.

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As mentioned earlier, focusing on individual soldiers also helps the movie completely avoid any moral or political obligations, and the emphasis on camaraderie compounds this. Once the characters are thrown into the war, and once the announcement is made that friendship and returning home safely are all that matters, then a war film can really get away with almost anything.

If the audience buys into it, they’ll no longer require an explanation as to why our protagonists are slaughtering people who also happen to have friends, brothers-in-arms, and families waiting at home. Although there are certainly films that do this more egregiously than Top Gun: Maverick does, it’s an essential quality of the film that makes the Navy and its members look like the most morally righteous organization one could imagine.

The Obsession with Military Tech

One of the biggest reasons why the U.S. military lends multi-billion dollar killing machines to randos from California is to have audiences drool over their slick, futuristic tech. This is also one of the significant innovations of the original Top Gun: the adoration, obsession, and almost sexualization of military technology.

High-tech fighter jets fly through the air while rock songs play in the background; movie stars describe their plane’s payloads and technical specs as if they’re bragging about their sexual prowess. This is what media studies scholar Roger Stahl calls technofetishism: the fetishization of military technology that is part of and contributes to the United States’ culture of guns, violence, and war.

After watching Top Gun: Maverick, one can’t help but think that fighter jets, the Navy, and warfare are just plain cool and that joining the Navy would somehow turn you into James Dean or Tom Cruise. Left out, of course, are the images of what the human body (or what’s left of it) looks like after it’s hit by a Tomahawk missile — or the civilian scientists cooked alive by radiation inside the “rogue nation’s” destroyed nuclear reactor.