The sequel to the critically acclaimed Hollywood film Top Gun hits theaters this week at a time when American diplomacy may be stuck in the 80s and at war with Russia.
The threat of nuclear war hangs over geopolitics like a toxic cloud and American actor Tom Cruise is back in the cockpit as Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell.
He looks barely a day older than when he first helped pilots back in 1986.
The sequel’s simply American cool and Southern patriotism reinforces a very modern trend in the world of film: cinema as a tool for military recruitment.
Over the past century, more than 800 Hollywood films have been heavily supported by the US military, such as the 1927 Best Picture Oscar winner Wings and the flop The Green Breeze (1968). Which was approved by the White House in an emotional way.
This film on the Vietnam War was released when the war was at its height. However it wasn’t until we first heard the summoning gestures of Goose, Jester and Iceman in the original Top Gun.
Made as a ‘compensation’, the film really hit the mark. The film’s dizzying aerial combat, catchy MTV soundtrack, and shirtless beach volleyball helped the U.S. Navy increase its recruitment by 500 percent after the film’s release.
Directed by Tony Scott, the marketing of the film was so successful that recruitment booths were set up in cinemas to capitalize on the sentiment.
TOP GUN: The prospect of a similar public relations push through music may have come at a better time for top U.S. military officials facing some of the biggest recruiting problems in decades.
In April, state senators were told how the US military faced a ‘war for talent’ in an environment of shrinking battalion numbers.
It echoes Air Force officials’ admission that its pool of qualified candidates has been halved since the start of Covid.
The situation is not good for the Navy, which announced in February that it was facing a shortage of five to six thousand sailors at sea.
A month before the announcements, Chinese ships tracked a US warship in the South China Sea and warned of ‘serious consequences’ after it allegedly strayed into illegal waters.
No wonder then that Uncle Sam once again welcomed Paramount Pictures with open arms to make a ‘maverick’.
Director Joseph Kosinski and his crew were issued access passes to highly sensitive naval facilities. These installations include a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
World-class technicians imparted advanced fighter pilot training to the film’s actors (in an emergency) from the set.
The actor took to the skies while production teams mounted cameras in F/A-18 Super Hornets.
In return, as in the original film, the script was approved by Bahria. This situation may also explain why Top Gun: Maverick never goes into detail about its villains – instead, the viewer is simply told that the ‘enemy’ is a rogue obsessed with uranium enrichment. The state is Suppose this state rhymes with ‘Darren’.
What’s new about Top Gun is that Music’s production team had the opportunity to work directly with weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin and its secretive Skunkworks division.
Wires were raised when one of the film’s early trailers showed a hypersonic aircraft named Dark Star, a modernized version of the Cold War-era SR71-Blackbird. The plane was not an actual prototype, but China didn’t know that.
According to Top Gun producer Jerry Bruckheimer, the Chinese moved spy space satellites to photograph the winged aircraft during filming, believing it might be real. “They thought it was real,” he told Sandbox News. How real it seems.’
Information (and even disinformation) is paramount in a world where competition in technology is on the rise and where Russian state TV broadcasts simulated scenes of destruction in the UK by a radioactive tsunami. Acting like it’s actually happening.
The more viewers, the bigger the message. In such a case, the global box office of cinema can be extended for this illusion and showmanship.
The Department of Defense’s support for Top Gun is a sign of a shift in reality that will be compared to Chinese cinema, which the government has long used to push its agenda.
Similarly, the Korean war film ‘The Battle at Lake Changjin’ was released in 2021 and was fully funded by Beijing’s Propaganda Department to the tune of 160 million pounds.
It became the most successful film in Chinese history, grossing £730 million at the box office.
A sequel of the same film ‘Watergate Bridge’ was made which was the most successful film at the local box office this year.
But the film faced stiff competition from another anti-American Korean War film ‘Sniper’ which was based on the life of a real-life legendary Chinese sniper shooter Zheng Taofeng who is believed to have spent 40 days had killed 214 American soldiers in less than The tagline of this film was ‘Send them all to hell’.
Judging by the total ticket sales of this film, it is clear how much demand there is for such revisionist entertainment.
In Russia too, the big screen is used to spread nationalism. Take for example the 2019 film T-34, which tells the story of a group of Russian prisoners of war who escape from Nazi camps with the help of a Soviet T-34 tank.
It is the third highest-grossing film in Russian history, with every scene depicting missiles marching through Red Square.
The film is part of the Kremlin’s program to instill national pride among Russian youth.
As we have seen since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin has been pushing to highlight the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany as much as possible.
Like the rest of the world, some of the most successful Hollywood films of the century were produced with the help of the Pentagon, including Avatar, the films of the Transformers franchise and the films of the Marvel series.
In the 2008 hit Iron Man, the real-life ‘Captain America’, Captain Christian Hodge, was the military handler on the set of the film who told his superiors how to make the Air Force look like a rock star.
Iron Man may have come from a comic book, but it tried to show us how an American contractor was prepared to travel to Afghanistan in a super suit and kill terrorists there, for whom it was impossible to do so. It was like flying a fly.
However, it still doesn’t show the partnership between the MCU and the Department of Defense being the best under-the-radar escape of the century.
That was, of course, until 2019’s Captain Marvel. Brie Larson stars as a top Air Force pilot given otherworldly superpowers.
It was also condemned by many quarters for playing like a military recruitment film. And it was right to do so in many cases.
The film unabashedly became ‘Team America’, meaning the US Air Force assisted with script research, locations and technical advice. Not only this, but before the movie in cinemas, advertisements for the recruitment of female pilots were played.
The world premiere of the film featured a red carpet of female pilots serving in the US Air Force and an elite squadron performing a flyover.
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It’s no coincidence that the film is being released at a time when the military is trying to diversify its talent pool, but despite the film’s feminist tone, it poses problems for Disney.
Britain’s cinemas close to our own homes have also been seen in recent years as an attractive source of military recruitment, with sticky floors in multiplexes and expensive ‘pick-n-mix’ military adverts to watch.
You hear these kinds of voice-overs in the cinema now: ‘I’m Kevin, I was born in a provincial town but I had to come on this big aircraft carrier in the Baltic Sea.’
Whether they belong to the Royal Navy or the Marine Commandos, each one is cinematically crafted.
In 2018, the British Army rolled out targeted ads targeting 16-24 year olds through the ‘This is Belonging’ campaign, specifically for blockbuster films inside cinemas equipped with 4DX technology.
Advertising company Digital Cinema Media said the collaboration provided the Army with an “excellent creative platform to create awareness, convey its message to the Army as a force with a unique, attractive and clutter-free environment.” and enabled to gain attention.’
Who knows, maybe you’ll find yourself longing to board a fighter jet when you go to the cinema to watch Maverick launch a bomb in the air, or maybe you’ll feel nostalgic for a CGI-lite blockbuster. Will experience what feels like a real throwback.
Either way, with the appetite for action films and defense contracts growing, you can expect the silver screen to play an important role in military strategy in the future. Naval chiefs have not yet lost this loving feeling.
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