Like its franchise predecessor, Top Gun, the long-awaited sequel Top Gun: Maverick never lets real-life geopolitics get in the way of the movie's triumphant sports movie tone and escapist plot. Top Gun: Maverick could have chosen to take the subject matter of war more seriously, but it is to the movie’s benefit that the sequel instead leaned into the original movie’s light-hearted atmosphere even further.
The original Top Gun invented pilot ranking, trophies, and air hangar classrooms to make the Navy look more glamorous, exciting, and fun (unsurprisingly, the real-life flight school uses conventional classrooms for its classes). This left Top Gun feeling less like a movie about actual, real-life war and more like a sports movie where the sport was dogfighting. In the same vein, Top Gun: Maverick essentially ignores all real-life conflicts to focus on its characters and their interpersonal drama.
Where the original Top Gun played down its war movie elements and played up its sports movie atmosphere, the sequel takes this idea and runs with it. The political allegiances of Top Gun: Maverick’s enemy combatants are never explained and the nation or even continent where their uranium lab is located is never disclosed (it could be in the United States for the all that the sequel tells viewers). Decades after original potential director John Carpenter warned Top Gun’s producers that addressing geopolitical specifics would render the movie ridiculously unrealistic, Top Gun: Maverick proved that the creators held onto this sage advice.
This approach allows Top Gun: Maverick to be a character-driven drama with thrilling action sequences, without the sequel shirking a responsibility to portray real-world conflicts with any degree of realism. Since the sequel is an entirely escapist fantasy, there is no specific real-life war being depicted in Top Gun: Maverick. Like the original movie, Top Gun: Maverick’s hero and villain are both Tom Cruise’s internally conflicted title character, and the story centers around his growth and his relationship with Miles Teller’s Rooster rather than an actual war.
While it is unclear whether Top Gun: Maverick would ever have named the nationality of its enemy combatants, the movie’s infamously delayed production could have made the odds of this slimmer than ever. Top Gun: Maverick’s release date changed from July 2020 to July 2021 to November 2021 to May 2022, meaning the landscape of international politics inevitably transformed massively in the intervening time. This made it all the wiser for the sequel to avoid any mention of specific countries or conflicts, which could easily have dated the movie in a way that focusing on character drama didn’t. Instead, Top Gun: Maverick became a fun summer blockbuster and a critical hit that has nothing to do with anything resembling the reality of war.
