Did you know that there’s a Taco Bell at the Pentagon? Technically, we can no longer
confirm it, but back before the information got restricted there were websites confirming that,
yup. There was, in fact, an entire food court there. Complete with Subway, a KFC,
Dunkin’ Donuts, and, of course, the Bell. Gotta say, bold choice there US Military,
BOLD CHOICE. Hope your toilets are as powerful as your fighter jets. Anyway,
none of this has anything to do with today’s theory. It was just an interesting thing that
I learned while researching for it that I wanted to pass along to you. Ah, I have
no good transition here, so ah, THROW UP A TITLE CARD! make it EXPLODE and HYPER MASCULINE y’know.
Hello Internet! Welcome to Film Theory. Talk to me Goose.
*HONK!* So, I’ve a confession to make;
I do not like the original Top Gun. I know…I know, It is cinematic blasphemy. But the cocky
hotshot protagonist is just too unlikable, the treatment of women is too outdated, and overall,
everyone is just too darn sweaty. Seriously. It’s like they jumped in a pool before filming every
scene. Someone PLEASE get these men some towels! The only reason I’m telling you this is to set
context. Because, despite my lowest of low expectations, I LOVED Top Gun: Maverick!
This story of a few fighter pilots trying to accomplish an impossible mission had me at the
edge of my seat the entire time, in a way that no world-ending sky beam ever has in the last decade.
It was exciting, but not overdone. It was simple, but it wasn’t dumb. And it was nostalgic, but, not
like annoying levels of nostalgic. It was a movie that was absolutely cheesy, but it recognized that
fact and embraced the cheese. Gotta say, I just really really liked it. And apparently I’m not
the only one. In a year that so far has featured massive MCU crossovers, the return of the most
popular superhero ever, and the conclusion to one of the 90’s most popular movie franchises…
the biggest film story of 2022 has been Top Gun: Maverick taking home Box Office Gold,
crossing a billion dollars and crushing absolutely ALL of the competition. Like, it’s not even close.
But perhaps, most interesting of all is that it does all of this without an identifiable “bad
guy.” Despite setting up this hugely important and impossible mission from the word “Go,”
Maverick never officially identifies the “hostile enemy nation” that Tom Cruise and
company end up in aerial combat against. We never actually get to SEE the enemy’s face.
And this is actually a tradition with the franchise. You see, in the original Top Gun,
they did the same thing…they never once identify who they’re supposed to be flying against. Sure,
most audiences generally assumed that the enemy was Soviet Russia, provided that the Cold War was
still pretty hot in 1986 and the fighters are ID’d as “MiGs” – aka jets manufactured by the Russian:
Mikoyan and Gurevich Design Bureau, but in reality, according to the filmmakers years later,
the intent was for the enemy nation to be NORTH KOREA! Yeah. I was surprised too. Apparently,
the only reason this became less clear in the final film was because the U.S.
State Department was trying to “normalize relations” with the North Korean government,
so they asked Top Gun’s producers to make the bad guys some unidentified “hostiles” flying
some made-up jets. By the way, that relationship between the government and Hollywood…yeah…probably
worth some theories one day. Anyway, in the original Top Gun, this didn’t
really make all that much of a difference, it was only an issue at the beginning and end of the
story. The enemy nation was just a minor bookend for a plot about hotshots working with each other
at school. In the new movie Maverick, though, this whole plot is built on an impossible suicide
mission to stop a country from achieving nuclear power. And since this is a realistic-ish drama,
you can’t just cheat like a Marvel movie and make up a fake country! So, to keep the enemy presence
anonymous, Top Gun: Maverick keeps the terrain remote and interchangeable; it largely confines
the action to flight suits and cockpits; and it makes the mission at the center of this whole
thing covert, on a need to know basis only. But here’s the thing I NEED to know! And I think that
there’s enough in here to figure it out. While most of the details are kept vague and nothing
is explicitly stated, we do learn A LOT IMPLICITLY about this nation during the course of the
training and final execution of the mission. So I wanted to see if we could figure this thing out.
What is the “rogue nation” that Tom Cruise and the gang are fighting against in Top Gun: Maverick?
Honestly, I walked out of the theater thinking…yet again…”that was a thinly-veiled reference to
Russia” Spoiler alert: It’s not. In fact, that initial assumption is SO wrong! So today, we’re
entering the Danger Zone of international politics to see whether or not we can piece together the
faceless enemy of Top Gun: Maverick using context clues, geographic hints, and easter eggs that are
sprinkled throughout the film. Sure, Tom Cruise, you can sneak past an onslaught of surface-to-air
missiles, but you can’t sneak past MatPat. Who are Maverick, Rooster, and their wingmen
REALLY up against in the new movie? Strap in friends, and check your six, we’re going in!
As I just mentioned, despite the enemy being kept anonymous throughout the new movie, we actually
learn a lot about them over the course of the film. Here’s the set-up: A uranium-enrichment
facility in an unnamed foreign territory is very close to achieving nuclear weapons,
and the Navy does NOT want this country to have nukes. To help bring down the facility,
the Navy calls in Maverick, Tom Cruise’s cocky all-star pilot, to teach a team of elite graduates
how to accomplish this dangerous bombing mission. The mission involves a low-altitude run through a
treacherous canyon defended by missiles, followed by a one-in-a-million shot at a distant target,
and then a daring escape that will almost certainly involve aerial dogfights against at
least THREE “fifth generation” enemy fighters. Basically, this thing is like the Death Star
trench run from Star Wars but with actual fighter jets instead of spacecraft. During the finale,
for both maximum closure AND maximum nostalgia, when both Maverick and Rooster (the son of
Maverick’s dead best friend Goose) are shot down behind enemy lines, they’re forced to fight their
way home in a stolen vintage F-14 Tomcat… just like the team flew back in the original in 1986.
The whole thing ends with the crew overcoming the odds…and their own personal daddy issues,
all with a minimal amount of sweat. So, hug it out there gentlemen! you deserve it.
First off, let’s look at the mission parameters themselves. We’re told that the unnamed hostile
actor at the center of this bombing raid is a “Rogue Nation” in the year 2022. Now, funny
enough, the State Department officially STOPPED using that term decades ago, instead replacing
it with the much less exciting label “States of Concern.” Something tells me, though, this
wasn’t a mistake on the part of the writers, but rather an intentional reference to a certain other
Tom Cruise franchise. We’re also told that this nation’s work to enrich uranium is “in violation
of a number of treaties”, and that the enrichment facility needs to be destroyed BEFORE they can get
the uranium to the point where they can create nuclear weapons. Which means that they DO NOT
currently have nukes. What they DO have though is a multi-tiered air and ground arsenal that
includes older refurbished aircraft like the F-14, a defense array of Soviet-era S125 surface-to-air
missiles, AND new fifth-generation fighters. Specifically, that’s a Russian Sukhoi SU-57,
with its real, actual NATO reporting name being - get this - “FELON”. We also know from digital maps
and training simulations that we see in the movie, that the terrain is mountainous with at least one
river and a large bridge, and that it’s within flying range of the ocean since the Navy fighters
are able to disembark directly from an aircraft carrier. And while some convenient cloud-cover
prevents us from seeing what the coastline of this country actually looks like, we definitely get a
VERY clear look at the very real terrain thanks to our heroes flying low and having to hoof it on
foot after getting shot down. Here, we see that at least part of the region is snowy,
meaning that we’re either at a high altitude or that it’s seasonally cold. Looking at the
plant life in the region, we can see large pine and fir trees. In reality, that’s because these
scenes were mainly shot in Washington State’s Cascade Mountains, so, you know, part of the
country that we’re ultimately looking for is going to have vibes similar to the Pacific Northwest.
Like I said, that’s actually a surprising amount of detail to work with! So, to start,
let’s explore the term “Rogue Nation” or “Rogue State”. Currently, there are only eight countries
that are officially categorized as “Rogue States” by the US Government, with a ninth that kinda
makes it on the list by default. On the list, we have Venezuela, Syria, Russia, Nicaragua,
North Korea, Iran, Cuba and Belarus, with that ninth country being Afghanistan since its current
government is controlled by the Taliban who aren’t recognized as legitimate by the US.
Alos, just to mention it for completionists sake: I’m gonna include China as a candidate here on the
list for the movie ONLY. Because, while officially on “friendly” terms with the US, the two countries
do have significant geopolitical disagreements. So already we’ve narrowed the list of possible
contenders down from 195 countries in the world, to only ten. And we can actually knock off a
few more quickly based on the mission parameters. Right off the bat, it can’t be China, North Korea,
or Russia since all of those countries already have themselves nuclear weapons. So them building
a NEW enrichment facility wouldn’t be as big of a deal, or as top of a secret as we see the enemy
nation in Maverick making of it. So now, we’re down to seven. From here, we’re gonna have to
dig a bit deeper into the details for each candidate. Afghanistan certainly LOOKS the
part. It has mountainous territory, snow, forests, defensible canyons, just like we see in the movie.
Afghanistan is also crawling with Soviet-era weaponry, and let’s just say that the current
leadership would be very unlikely to decline having their own uranium enrichment facility. All
of it would seem to fit. Except, there’s just one problem… Afghanistan is landlocked, approximately
280 miles away from its nearest coast in the Arabian Sea, so that’s going to strain
the logistical possibility of the film’s finale. The “no coastline” issue also eliminates Belarus,
despite its Russian-aligned leader DEFINITELY being on America’s naughty list these days.
Another point against Belarus; though its climate is in line with what we see in the film, its
geography is actually too flat for the mountains we see in the film. On the flip side is Cuba,
which we’re going to eliminate for the exact opposite problem. While it’s absolutely close
enough to ocean water, Cuba is DEFINITELY not our culprit. It’s a tropical island,
and therefore doesn’t have any snow. This is also going to eliminate Nicaragua from the list,
since it doesn’t ever snow there either. We can also eliminate Venezuela - though it snows
a LITTLE up in the highest elevations of the Andes mountains, it definitely doesn’t have
a tree canopy that looks anything like what we see in Maverick. The Andes are a Tropical Montane
Cloud Forest with a flora coverage primarily of conifer trees, which would NOT match the Cascade
Mountain aesthetic shooting location at all. And just like that, our roster has suddenly
narrowed from 195 to only two: Syria and Iran. And we did that in what, like a page? a page and
a half? two long-ish paragraphs? That’s gotta be a record here. This is practically a YouTube Short,
we’re being so efficient. Anyway, Syria and Iran. These two countries are actually pretty
close together geographically, both would be accessible from the Persian Gulf using the F-18
Hornet fighter jets that we see our heroes flying in Maverick. And while this may be a surprise
given that Middle Eastern countries often are stereotyped as giant deserts, they both also have
mountainous regions where the snow and vegetation could reasonably pass the Pacific Northwest.
Both countries have also been either suspected or accused of developing nuclear programs outside of
international agreements in the past, so at least for the purposes of the fictitious story of this
movie, that part is also going to check out. Of the pair, Syria seems like it's the
most logical answer. In fact, this whole movie’s plot may just be based on a real
operation that actually happened there. You see, Syria has already attempted to enrich Uranium
in the recent past, starting a secret project at a reactor in a remote valley back in 2007.
Ha…secret enrichment program in a remote valley you say? Someone call in Tom Cruise! The facility
was eventually blown up by Israeli fighter jets in a mission that was only acknowledged a decade
later as “Operation Outside the Box”. Gotta love how militaries worldwide name their top secret
operations… Anyway, the circumstances of that event are so similar to the mission in Maverick,
I wouldn’t be surprised if at least part of the plot’s inspiration originated here. It’s also
worth noting that the Syrian Government has had far more active military engagements recently,
its President is also know for buying Russian Arms and military support. So,
if anyone’s going to have the Russian-built fifth generation fighters like we see in the movie,
Syria is one where it’s going to make a lot of sense. In fact, Russia has already tested their
fifth-generation fighters over Syria multiple times in the past. Syria also has the much older
Sukhoi SU-22 and -24 models as part of their active air force. So really it seems like Syria
is the obvious slam dunk here: They’ve got the planes, they’ve got the geography, they’ve got the
history of trying to enrich the uranium. It seems that the only thing they don’t have are the F-14s.
They certainly have a fair number of older planes in their air force, but they’re missing that one
crucial model. And it’s a model that we HAVE to have to get that big nostalgic punch in the final
act of the movie. How else are two testosterone charged men supposed to overcome their beef!?
So, that just leaves us with one: Iran. And they check pretty much all of our boxes. Though
they haven’t had as many recent active military entanglements, they DO have a similar history
of buying up Russian aircraft and weaponry. Like Syria, they do have a Sukhoi Su-24 in their air
force’s active roster…again, a much older model, but it shows a history of purchasing Russian
supplies. And recently, it seems that they’ve expressed interest in purchasing Russia’s newest
fifth generation fighters. Additionally, Iran has similar terrain and geography to what we see
in the film, they’re close enough to an ocean that a US Carriers could launch missiles and
jet-fighters into it for a mission, AND they’ve had nuclear ambitions in the recent past. See,
though Iran was supposed to denuclearize thanks to a deal made during the Obama Administration,
the program has entered much more unknown territory after more recent presidencies withdrew
the US from the agreement. Of more immediate importance to the events of Maverick, though:
Iran is one of the ONLY modern military powers still operating an active fleet of F-14 Tomcats.
That means, it’s just about the only plausible candidate on the list that could also allow
for that nostalgia-rific climax with Tom Cruise and Rooster flying the original “Top Gun Jet.”
And there you have it, Loyal Theorists. By process of elimination, the most likely candidate for the
unnamed enemy in Top Gun: Maverick is Iran. It’s the only place that has the right mix of politics,
military resources, geographic location, topographical details, environmental terrain,
and specific use of weapons technology to make the events of the film play out
exactly like we see them do on screen. Or, you know what? Maybe I’m completely
wrong. Maybe the big twist of this whole thing is that really this movie was a secret crossover.
Just look at the enemy’s logo on the fighter jets. Looks an awful lot like THIS symbol;
the symbol of ARSTOZKA from the game “PAPERS PLEASE!” Maybe the real theory here is that
Top Gun: Maverick was actually the most successful video game movie of all time.
But hey, that’s just a theory! A Film Theory! Aaaaand CUT!