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.

So I wondered if Midnight Hammer had any female pilots. And I guess this tweet answers it:

In the film, Maverick has to be the good guy, and no male hero in his place when the film was made would have gotten away with not choosing the girl. The first Top Gun was criticized for only having a love interest for Maverick but no female pilots.

That isn’t to say women should not be pilots or fly in combat. If they can be trusted and proven capable, why not? But a mission like the one in Top Gun: Maverick and Operation Midnight Hammer is the kind of mission where you don’t take chances like that.

Monica Barbaro’s character was chosen supposedly because she’s the best, but no one watching the movie believes that.

It seems fairly obvious that they’re setting up a new Top Gun: Maverick for the younger generation with a new Goose, Rooster, his son, played by Miles Teller, and Hangman as the new Maverick, played by Glen Powell.

So it seemed odd that the Powell character was sidelined for the critical mission. But then we see why. He had to learn his humility lesson to come back and save the day.

When we finally get our happy ending, it feels deserved. Our hero has gone on a journey and has returned a transformed man, with his deep inner wounds healed, his purpose reinstated, and a whole new Top Gun team is born.

The stupidest thing Hollywood ever did was remove the central male hero from movies. They did this to make movies more equitable. They did this to fix society. But in so doing, they destroyed much of what we need from movies. We don’t just need heroes. We need men to be heroes. It’s okay to tell that story.

After Midnight Hammer was so perfectly executed, we didn’t get our round of applause from many in this country. It had to be a failure because Trump has to fail. Every Democrat except John Fetterman had to go to extremes, call for Trump’s impeachment, and paint the mission as a dangerous escalation to war.

There was one Democrat, one of the few sane ones, who was able to articulate how awful it feels to watch an entire political party root against America because they hate Trump that much, Dan Turrentine:

It isn’t only the Democrats and the Left. There are the usual opportunists and influencers on the Right, too, and some even in the party, like Thomas Massie. They all seem to think that having a public debate in Congress before bombing Iran was the better plan. The whole idea of the mission was that it was top secret.

These influencers are now locking arms with the Democrats to discredit and destabilize Trump’s authority and the success of Operation Midnight Hammer. Their objectives are different. The Left hates Trump. The Right hates Israel. But they are coming together with the same goal.

To me, this proves that Top Gun Maverick isn’t military or war propaganda. Considering how popular it was and that it rescued Hollywood in its darkest days, you’d think that the mission sold in the film would resonate more broadly with Americans and make such a mission more acceptable.

But the film never names the enemy. Much was made of this fact when it first came out, so if Mike Benz and others suggest that Top Gun Maverick was potentially a fluffer for getting the US into war with Iran, they’d be mistaken.

In 2022, Slate Magazine reviewed the potential enemies in this piece and ranked Iran among the least likely. But for a film to work as propaganda, it would also have to turn us against the threat, and Top Gun Maverick never does.

So maybe this time, it really is just a movie. But oh, what a movie.

I might be a movie geek, but I’m also a patriot. Maybe that comes from watching so many great war movies that, for decades, sold support for America and our troops. And maybe we’re so divided because we no longer share the same heroes, and we no longer share the same enemies.

One thing I sense about Trump is that he is one of the few presidents in history who is not running for re-election, is not a lame duck, and genuinely wants to do what he believes is right.

It might sound strange to say I feel about the military like I do about movies. But it’s true. I can only express my gratitude and say what Maverick says to Rooster at the end of Top Gun: Maverick.