There is a scene in Top Gun: Maverick where Pete Mitchell pulls off a manoeuvre that is physically impossible and saves his squadron. The crowd in the cinema cheered. It is a genuinely thrilling film. It made a billion dollars in its opening month. Navy recruiters set up tables outside theatres specifically to catch people walking out still buzzing from the adrenaline.
That is not a coincidence. That is the plan.
The Oldest Recruitment Tool in the Business
When the original Top Gun came out in 1986, applications to become naval aviators reportedly jumped dramatically. Whether the exact numbers have ever been precisely verified is debatable — but the effect was real enough that the military acknowledged it, celebrated it, and immediately began applying the same logic to future film productions. By 2022, when Maverick arrived, the US Air Force was literally running its own recruitment advertisement before every screening. Recruiters stood outside theatres across the country with clipboards, ready to sign up anyone who walked out wanting to be Maverick.
This is a system. Hollywood and the military have a long and well-documented arrangement. In exchange for access to jets, aircraft carriers, bases, and technical advisors that make films like Top Gun look the way they do, the studios agree to portrayals that make military life look the way the recruiters need it to look. Glamorous. Purposeful. Morally uncomplicated.
The jets are real. The story they are embedded in is a carefully constructed fiction.
What the Film Does Not Show
Top Gun: Maverick is a film about a man who follows his instincts, bends the rules, saves everyone, and suffers no meaningful consequences for any of it. His mission is clear. His enemy is unambiguous. The cause is unquestionably just. Nobody in the film spends a sleepless night wondering whether they are on the right side.
Real military service has never looked like that. And in 2026, the gap between the cinema version and the reality has never been more starkly visible.
On 28 February 2026, the United States launched a surprise military attack on Iran — during active nuclear negotiations, without Congressional approval, and without what most international legal observers would describe as a legitimate basis in international law. The opening strikes killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and several other officials. Since then, over a thousand people have died. US military personnel have been killed in the region. The war has no defined end point and no clear definition of what victory looks like.
The pilots flying those missions trained for years. Some of them probably watched Top Gun as children. Some of them signed up partly because of films exactly like it.
None of them chose the Iran war. They were ordered into it.
The Part Nobody Puts in the Movie
When you enlist, you take an oath. The precise wording varies by country but the principle is universal — you will follow the orders of the officers appointed over you, within the bounds of law. In practice, for the vast majority of military careers, this is never tested in any meaningful way. You do your job, you come home, you are proud of your service.
But occasionally — and this is the part the recruitment posters leave out — the person at the top of the chain of command makes a decision that puts you somewhere you did not expect to be, doing something you did not sign up for, for reasons that have nothing to do with the defence of your country and everything to do with the political calculations of one person on one particular day.
What do you do then?
The answer, legally, is more complicated than most people realise. The military oath does not require unconditional obedience — it requires obedience to lawful orders. An unlawful order — one that violates domestic law, international law, or basic standards of human decency — can and should be refused. This is not a loophole. It is written into military law precisely because of what happens when soldiers stop asking whether orders are lawful and simply comply.
But in practice, the line between a lawful order and an unlawful one is not always obvious when you are on a carrier in the Gulf and someone with more stars on their shoulder is telling you to fly. And the consequences of refusal — court martial, discharge, professional destruction — are real and immediate in a way that the moral consequences of compliance tend not to be, until much later.
The Center on Conscience and War reported a significant rise in US service members seeking conscientious objector status specifically over the Iran war. At least three fighter pilots are among those who sought help. The most cited reason was a US strike on a girls’ school in Iran. That detail does not feature prominently in any recruitment advertisement.
The Dilemma Nobody Signs Up For
The fantasy version of military service — the Top Gun version — involves a clear enemy, a just cause, a mission that saves lives, and a commander who is wise and honourable. You fly, you win, you come home.
The reality sometimes involves being ordered to participate in something that a significant portion of the world, including many of your own colleagues, considers illegal and wrong — launched without the legal authorisation required by your country’s own constitution, prosecuted during negotiations that had not yet failed, resulting in the deaths of civilians whose names you will never know.
You did not vote for this. You did not choose this. You are twenty-three years old and you trained to be a pilot because a film made it look like the most meaningful thing a person could do with their life.
And now you are being asked to decide, very quickly, whether following this particular order is something you can live with.
That question is not in the movie. It does not appear in the recruitment brochure. It is not discussed at the table set up outside the cinema. But it is the most important question in the entire enterprise — and every person who enlists is, in some sense, agreeing to eventually face it.
The Films We Make About War Tell Us What We Want to Believe
This is not an argument that military service has no value. It does, genuinely, in the right circumstances and under the right leadership. Nor is it an argument that everyone who works in defence is complicit in every decision made above them. Most are not.
It is an argument that the version of military life that gets shown on a forty-foot screen — the clean version, the heroic version, the one where the cause is always just and the mission is always clear — is a curated product designed to make young people feel things that lead them to a recruitment table.
The films we make about war are not documentaries. They are aspirational marketing materials with enormous production budgets. And the gap between the aspiration and the reality is wide enough, in some cases, to change the entire shape of a person’s life — or end it in a place they never imagined, for reasons they were never asked about.
Top Gun: Maverick is a brilliant film. The flying sequences are extraordinary. Tom Cruise remains one of the most compelling screen presences alive.
It is also, at its core, a very expensive advertisement. And like all advertisements, it shows you only what it wants you to see.
These are personal observations and opinions. Almost Sunny is a personal blog.
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