‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Delivers, but is Tom Cruise the Military Industrial Complex?

Top Gun: Maverick is for all intents and purposes a good movie. It doesn’t glorify the military but instead teamwork and doing things for the love of it and not the glory. There are still military recruiters posting up outside of showings of it. When coupled with Tom Cruise’s many roles, it begs the question: is his cultural impact really that he is a plant for the military-industrial complex? The Top Gun That Was There can’t be anything to say about Top Gun: Maverick without reaching back to discuss the first Top Gun. This will be so referential that it’ll have the feel of those Levi’s ‘Buddy Lee’ commercials. “Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise, in…Top Gun 2! Executive Produced by Tom Cruise.”

Tom ‘NBA Youngboy’ Cruise circa 1985, image courtesy Paramount Pictures

Either way, the 80s gave us a new archetype that echoed all throughout the films of the time: the ‘hero’ as the wild card. The nerds in Nerds, the rascals in The Goonies, the motley crews of John Cusack’s many early movies, Naked Gun and all of John Hughes’ movies. So on and so on. But who knew that Top Gun would blow the roof off the idea and cement a new action archetype? Every marketing department on Earth, that’s who. Tom Cruise’s ‘Maverick’ would inspire writers for decades. Making the story’s hero a reckless, devil-may-care type that audiences can rock with and deal with little to none of the consequences of their actions was just what the 80s needed. That was sarcasm, the out-of-control capitalism, and warmongeri…