The Left Can’t Seem to Wrap Its Head Around the Success of ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ – Opinion

If you haven’t seen the sequel to the 1986 breakout hit “Top Gun,” then stop what you’re doing and buy tickets now. I haven’t been that stoked after a movie since the early aughts.

I’m not alone in my opinion, either. “Top Gun: Maverick” is forecasted to be Tom Cruis’s first $1 billion movies, and every weekend the film seems to rake in more and more cash. Yes, it is. I’m planning to return to the cinema to view it again. It’s that good.

(READ: ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Met All Expectations, Save One)

But as usual, the woke scolds are seeing the movie’s success and are scrambling to cover it with a narrative before people can reach their own opinion’s about it.

You see, the movie doesn’t really engage in politics. It doesn’t have a political message. It’s purely driven by characters, dynamic situations, and top-notch action that relies on very minimal CGI. This movie doesn’t denigrate women with tired feminist stories, and it does not attempt to verify unnecessary identity boxes. It is so political that the antagonist is kept a secret throughout. The mission Tom Cruis’s “Pete Mitchell” must train his students for is against a country that’s never named.

It’s just pure, unadulterated cinema.

Leftist journalists can’t register this but it’s not stopping them from trying. The Guardian immediately told fans that its success isn’t due to being pro-American or anti-woke right in the title, and then proceeded to tell everyone that it has a conservative bent while admitting the movie is apolitical:

All that said, Top Gun: Maverick does have a conservative skew; it’s just a more streamlined version of the conservatism of (contrary to these ding-dongs’ assertions) so many movies with blockbuster aspirations. Although there are moments where Maverick looks back on his life and his legacy (including a touching scene with Iceman, Val Kilmer), most of the film is just a bland movie that supports the status quo.

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In other words, Top Gun 2 is studiously “apolitical” in the way that rightwingers love, because it allows them to claim just-plain-folks victory where white male/military dominance have no sociopolitical dimension – they’re the default, the normal thing.

If you take a look back at the mindset of leftist journalists that dominate the mainstream media, it is easy to see why. That which is “apolitical” is actually “conservative.” If it doesn’t carry the message then it must be right-leaning by default. All that is conservative, regardless of its political leanings, is bad. It feeds white patriarchy.

Pleas to keep “politics” out of movies have an implicit definition of politics that includes radical concepts like “non-white actors” and “more than one woman”. This is where leftwingers also play in, as we see the subtle conservative agenda embedded in films with provocative or ideological ambiguities.

Do you think the movie is too conservative? No, but when you’ve drifted so far to the left that everything is viewed through the lens of identity and class struggle, anything that doesn’t compliment your worldview becomes “conservative.” I truly believe the author of this piece doesn’t understand just how far he’s sunk into his own ideology. He sees “monsters” where there are none and is now charging at them through his writing.

It’s just a windmill, dude.

Salon, do you remember them? took a very similar tac in reassuring themselves that it wasn’t anti-wokeness that made the movie successful and weirdly focused on balls:

However, “Top Gun: Maverick” does something those films don’t, in that it comforts a demographic that may harbor grave concerns about its impending obsolescence, its waning influence, and declining potency.

This movie, in short, validates old balls of all sizes and types, including raisins and apricots.

Salon’s argument is that conservatives like the movie because they’re all old and white, and the movie appeals to aging people who are being pushed out and replaced, much like Maverick:

Long before all of that kicks in, though, we see Maverick being cut down to size by Ed Harris’ leathery Rear Admiral Chester “Hammer” Cain, who is keen to replace the likes of our hero with drone technology. “The future is coming, and you’re not in it,” he growls before adding, “The end is inevitable, Maverick. Your kind is headed for extinction!”

This is why you might understand the reason conservatives desire to make this their movie.

To that portion of the audience, “Top Gun: Maverick” is a two-hour, 11-minute Cialis ad, starring a guy with flexible hips who can still climb a ladder to clean his own roof gutters.

The Salon writer fell into the same trap as the Guardian’s Guardian reporter. Interestingly, it’s the same trap that some right-leaning figures have fallen into as well.

The fight is over whether or not the film is “anti-woke.” It’s not anti-woke, because it doesn’t engage in politics. It doesn’t bother with political concepts. It’s just good storytelling that anyone can enjoy if they would take off their political blinders and enjoy the movie for what it is.

It is an excellent sequel, which took time to create. It has continuity with the first film. The characters and their motivations make sense. The problems and solutions are both logical and understandable.

If anything counts against the left, it’s that the film is a loud message to Hollywood that apolitical movies with solid screenwriting, acting, and apolitical marketing are a winning formula. Don’t preach, just do the best job you can to make a solid film that entertains. That’s it. It’s not a message the activist left wants Hollywood to hear, but Maverick’s box office returns are saying it pretty loudly.

You should go see yourself to help make it louder.