With the Memorial Day weekend release of Top Gun: Maverick, conservative pundits have taken the culture war to the skies, hailing the blockbuster as a patriotic, anti-“woke” display of militarism and masculinity. They have also cited its record-breaking box office performance—grossing $160.5 million domestically over the long weekend—as proof that the public is on their side.  

The long-awaited sequel picks up more than three decades after the original, with Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, played by Tom Cruise, being called on to train a squadron of elite U.S. Navy pilots for a bombing run on a “rogue” state’s uranium enrichment plant. At no point in the film are questions raised about why the U.S. is bombing this other country, which, by going unnamed, has led to a media guessing game. The climax sees Cruise take off from a U.S. Pacific Fleet aircraft carrier while flying a F/A-18E Super Hornet. Dazzling displays of aerial combat ensue.

Aside from the Defense Department propaganda inherent to most of Hollywood’s military-themed creations, the film is not overtly political in a way that is recognizable to Americans who have grown accustomed to Air Force flyovers at the Super Bowl and World Series. In many regards, Top Gun: Maverick feels like a product of the ’80s—a decade that saw the U.S. invading countries like Grenada and Panama while also in the throes of the Cold War with Russia. And like the original 1986 movie, it is an exhilarating, beautifully produced military recruitment ad that favors neither Republican nor Democratic sensibilities. It manages to portray a conflict over nuclear weapons as downright fun.

This has led many conservatives to project their own cultural aspirations onto the film. “It’s very patriotic, the film. I mean, the military is a bunch of good-looking young people who are going out to defend the country…and the international order,” said Ben Shapiro in a recent review of the film. “That’s awesome.” Shapiro, a conservative podcast host, then praised the filmmakers for not “treating the military as either victims of mental health problems or people who are victimized by the evil American regime, or as imperialists themselves, or as corrupt, or as terrible.”

Despite acknowledging that he had not seen the film, Breitbart columnist John Nolte preemptively lauded Top Gun: Maverick as a “masculine, pro-American, stridently non-woke blockbuster,” adding, “Rather than apologize for being an ’80s ‘relic,’ it embraced what everyone loved in 1986 and still loves today.” While citing a number of Hollywood’s “woke flops,” Nolte wrote that Top Gun: Maverick avoided that fate by “respect[ing] human nature” and eschewing progressive commentary. “It didn’t do what James Bond did—turn itself into a mewling little pajama boy gerbil of a movie,” he added. “It didn’t do what Star Wars did and pervert a romantic adventure series into a shrill Womyn’s Studies lecture.”

Top Gun: Maverick is the latest Hollywood production that commentators on the right have portrayed as a culture-war victory. Over the past year, conservatives have celebrated the success of Yellowstone, a drama that revolves around a Montana ranching family, and inexplicably tied the show’s high ratings to its supposed “real America” themes—namely, its rural setting and Kevin Costner’s role as a traditionally strong patriarch. “The show isn’t woke. It isn’t trying to lecture anyone about everything that is wrong with our culture,” wrote Meghan McCain in a January op-ed. “It doesn’t portray the elitist perspective of coastal television writers and where they think America should be going.” (Yellowstone is not exactly a straightforward conservative vehicle, though, as it recounts the U.S. government’s attempt to sterilize Indigenous women, features far-right, anti-government antagonists, and touches on cultural appropriation and racism.)

Likewise, conservatives have latched on to Cruise’s performance in Top Gun: Maverick. “This is 2022, and cheering on a straight white male military hero is problematic to the small but vocal minority that runs the culture,” wrote conservative film critic Christian Toto, who praised the film’s writers for not making Cruise’s character partake in “hand-wringing over military might or extended emasculation of its rugged hero.” The Daily Wire, a right-wing news site, commended the movie’s creators for highlighting “the greatness of the Reagan era” while not updating the sequel with “rainbow-flag-representing characters.”

“In this disheartening new world in which military generals parrot the virtues of diversity and inclusion instead of merit and readiness…the one concession the film makes to modern realities is a single female pilot who never makes an issue of her gender,” wrote Megan Basham. She went on to remark that the film’s mostly male cast brings “to mind a time when the U.S. still won wars and displayed both courage and convictions on the international stage.”