Top Gun: MAGA Edition—Trump’s Iran strike channels Tom Cruise classic
When Top Gun: Maverick stormed theatres in 2022, it wasn’t just a sequel—it was a resurrection. It defied every law of modern franchise gravity. No multiverse. No Marvel. No brooding they-them anti-hero. Just the return of a square-jawed cis-American icon doing exactly what he did 36 years ago—only faster, louder, and with a bigger sonic boom, looking like the folks at Scientology had finally found the Fountain of Youth.
What made it work?
First, it respected the original. No irony. No winks. No smug Gen Z subtext. Tom Cruise didn’t hand over the keys—he repossessed the plane, flew it through a canyon at Mach 1.6, and landed it on an aircraft carrier with his grin cryogenically preserved in confidence. Kenny Loggins was still on standby. The soundtrack still slapped. The opening still had that slow-mo montage of jets and muscle, set to a synth-and-snare build-up so patriotic it practically handed you a Coors Light and called you "sir."
There was shirtless beach football. Beer without guilt. Bros being bros in the golden light of American masculinity. Maverick didn’t just bring back a movie—it brought back a memory.
Of the good old days, before drone warfare, before greyzone psyops, before movies needed three disclaimers and a trigger warning. A time when war was sexy, the rules were simple, and the only labels that mattered were 'friendly' and 'bogey on your six.'
Second, it was real. Practical stunts. Real G-forces. No Marvel mush or green-screen gibberish. You felt every dive, every roll, every breath in a cockpit that looked more like a coffin. In an age of CGI fatigue, Maverick reminded viewers what cinema used to feel like—sweaty palms and pounding heartbeats, set to the scream of a jet engine.
But above all, Top Gun: Maverick gave audiences something even rarer: sincerity. It wasn’t cynical. It wasn’t ashamed of heroism. It put on aviators, turned up the volume, and said: "Let’s go."
And go it did—straight into the heart of America’s foreign policy theatre. Because what looked like a nostalgia-fuelled testosterone trip in 2022 now feels like something far more uncanny in 2025. As President Donald Trump orders a massive stealth strike on Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility, Maverick doesn’t look like a movie anymore.
It looks like a propehcy.
A daring pre-emptive strike. An underground uranium plant. A ticking clock. A threat not to America, but to unnamed "allies in the region." What once felt like high-octane fantasy is now playing out, almost scene for scene, in the skies above the Middle East. And Tom Cruise? He wasn’t just making a sequel. He was filming the trailer for Trump’s next war.