Reeling Back

Why am I not excited? After years of production delays and rescheduled release dates, Top Gun: Maverick premieres today (May 27). Arriving in theatres within days of the original feature’s 36th anniversary (May 16), it has been the subject of intense advance publicity, with Internet mavens weighing in on everything from its place in the career of Tom Cruise to the sophistication of the IMAX cinematography. Not having seen the picture, I can’t disagree with the apparently positive critical consensus, or predictions that it will be the box-office hit of 2022. I’m not excited because I’m not a fan of the mindless militarism that such films endorse. As early as 2019, we were alerted to the fact that the U.S. Department of Defense was a major participant in the production. In exchange for access to U.S.N. equipment and facilities, the Pentagon got script approval and control over the film’s final cut. The new movie arrives as Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine goes into its fourth month, an invasion that is having unintended global consequences. To date, the response from the self-appointed “leader of the free world” has been unhelpful nostalgia for the Cold War confrontations of yore. American popular culture, after years of infatuation with superhero fantasies, is enthusiastically recycling Ronald Reagan’s simple faith in patriotic obedience. A landmark expression of that faith was director Tony Scott’s tale of dogfighting jet pilots, the 1986 boxoffice blockbuster Top Gun.