It's crazy that four years have passed since Top Gun: Maverick hit theaters. It's a movie I've only ever seen on the big screen: the biggest screen in America, in fact. And it’s one of those movies that I feel like I just can’t watch anywhere else. So I was excited to see that it was in theaters again alongside the original film celebrating its 40th anniversary. I don't care about seeing the original, but fuck dude I wanted to see the Proving Run again. 

And I am happy to say that it was as I remembered it: one of the most thrilling sequences ever committed to digital celluloid. On its own worth the price of admission. And really that whole final act is just phenomenal: it is something that only the cinema – and ~$170 million – can give you. 

But even as that remains true, the vibes have shifted in a big way. It’s not like the feelings were never there. We always knew it was military propaganda peddling a very particular version of the American fiction (there are white picket fences for pete's sake!),  I'm a big America hater. but they don’t get on the aircraft carrier if the military doesn’t sign off on it and so you don’t get the Proving Run without the propaganda and at the time it felt like something I could roll my eyes at and move on. I mean, it’s funny that the movie just says “the enemy’ instead of having the guts to call it (geographically) Russia or (geopolitically) Iran! Not “ha ha” funny, but like eye-rollingly silly. 

Or, it was. It’s not anymore. Because the fantasy doesn’t feel so fantastical, because this rerelease feels like a more pointed sort of propaganda. And I know it isn’t, that Top Gun was released 40 years ago yesterday and these anniversary releases are big and popular and was certainly planned long ago… but in this moment, the US military feels fragile. The “Department of War” has gotten us into a war that we immediately lost and that continues to wreak further havoc on the global economy: it’s pathetic, honestly. There’s that not-really-a-joke about how Americans don’t have universal healthcare because we gotta buy all the bombs and yet look what that got us. America’s soft power is crumbling, and David Fucking Ellison – the man who has killed CBS News and is on way to do the same to CNN while also fucking Warner Bros the way it’s fucking Paramount – has his name in the Top Gun Maverick credits. 

And so the film continues to represent the reprehensible things it always did, but the actions it is glorifying feel much closer to the headlines than they did and that fucking sucks on every imaginable level. And I think what it really does is expose some of the weaknesses that always existed outside of those fight scenes.

I was reminded of Film Crit Hulk’s excellent take on the film –which looked at it from three totally different perspectives on the old saying “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore!” – and specifically this line: “And the initial darts / piano scene requires a loose, sweaty energy that [Director Joseph] Kosinski just might be a bit too sterile for.”

At the time I didn’t really feel that way, but now I really do. It’s utterly bizarre that the triple darts bulls-eye that introduced Glen Powell happens in a wide shot. It's even weirder that all of Miles Teller’s piano playing and the accompanying merriment is shot entirely on a tripod. It really does feel… off. And I think F1 – a similar but notably worse movie – really cemented for me that issue. “Sterile” is a good word for it, because it feels devoid of any kind of style. What these movies reflect is a fetish for technology (and especially cinematic technology). When Kosinski can put an iPhone into an F1 car, he’s a happy man, but when he has to film two people kissing? Yee-uck! There are maybe 5 seconds of kissing in this whole movie that has a very significant romantic subplot between two very hot people! Let Tom Cruise and Jennifer Connoly kiss and let us see it! (I vaguely recall F1 being less prudish but also god all that non-race stuff was boring as hell so who can say for sure.)

And so you’re faced with conversations about how cool it is to be military and how fun it is to be military and oh man I killed a person in combat so I’m so much better than everyone else ❤️ and there’s nothing for that ick to hide behind. 

But where I do think the film holds up is its true belief in humans. The “reality” of its imagery is overstated – the excellent “No CGI” is just Invisible CGI series started with Maverick for a reason – which hurts the meta a little bit I think, but right from the start it’s about humans rejecting the idea that robots must be the future. This movie came out around 6 months before ChatGPT was released to the public, and things have only gotten worse since then. An officer complaining about those pesky humans with their own opinions who disobey orders versus a bot that won’t opens a lot of different ideas simultaneously, though they mostly come down to the bullshit between Anthropic and the Pentagon! Hate all of that. 

But I don’t hate that this is a movie that would find it pretty gross that when the US actually bombed Iran it asked a chatbot to help it figure out how to do so. The constant drumbeat of “It’s not the plane it’s the pilot” offers the barest glimmer of light in the unrelenting darkness because yes: people are the thing that matter! (It’s wild how pro-human I’ve become in the last few years considering how anti-human I was for the thirty-odd years that preceded them). 

I certainly don’t “regret” seeing Top Gun Maverick again, but I think this will be the last time I do so… unless, like, the American empire truly collapses and it can be some funny little artifact from the olden days. I don’t think that movies are escapist fantasies, but I believe that blockbuster cinema in general wants to be that; absolutely this movie wants to be that. 

But in 2026? There’s no escape here.