In Top Gun Maverick They Picked the Girl. For Midnight Hammer, They Picked the Best.

After the bombs dropped on Iran’s nuclear facilities, there were some rumblings on X that the mission felt eerily familiar. Mike Benz said Operation Midnight Hammer is the same mission that plays out in the grand finale of Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick.

His followers quickly pointed out that they’re using fighter jets in Top Gun: Maverick, not the stealth B-2 bomber. The $2 billion plane is called the “ghost of the skies” because it is undetectable on radar.

Even if the rough details are the same, the mission is slightly different because in the film, the pilot's skill is everything.

Top Gun: Maverick is the American film industry at its finest, just as Operation Midnight Hammer is the American military at its finest. The film gives back more than it takes. It doesn’t lecture us. It doesn’t try to fix us. It merely entertains us for a couple of hours by reminding us why we need heroes and why we’ll always respond to the Hero’s Journey.

We need heroes because, as the Buddhists say, life is suffering. We need them because every day we wake up alive is a good day. But most of our days are mundane and ordinary. And that might explain why Top Gun: Maverick resonated so deeply three years ago.

After COVID and the Great Awokening brought Hollywood to its knees, the film industry desperately needed a Deus ex Machina. When Top Gun: Maverick made upwards of $700 million, it looked like it had finally arrived. It also earned a well-deserved Best Picture nomination and probably should have won, but it’s been a while since they picked the actual Best Picture of the Year.

Like the first Top Gun, Maverick was criticized as military propaganda. But we do ask our soldiers to fight and die in war as we sit in cafes with matcha lattes, so it’s the least we can do to make a movie celebrating them.

It turns out that Top Gun: Maverick isn’t propaganda for the military. It’s propaganda for the human race. It’s propaganda for even having hopes or dreams at all. It’s propaganda for feeling like a winner when the whole world is against you. We need heroes to take us on that journey. Even if we didn’t know we needed them, we only have to watch them on screen to understand why.

Tom Cruise in Top Gun is our ordinary world. He’s brought back into the extraordinary because he’s the only pilot who can fly like that and reach Mach 10.

What’s so great about Top Gun: Maverick is that while it shows our hero succeeding, it also shows him pushing too far and failing. We’re now hooked to see if he can learn his lesson.

Like all heroes, Maverick must be blessed with something special that makes him the only person who can save the day.

It might sound silly when reduced to the basics, but a tried-and-true formula works. We root for the hero we know. The harder it is on him, the more invested we become.

Top Gun: Maverick, to my mind, has very few flaws. But it does have one. They chose the girl to fly the critical mission. I didn’t buy it. Maybe we can believe that extraordinary women exist just as extraordinary men do. It’s only a movie, after all. But suspension of disbelief only goes so far.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe