THE sheer scale of Top Gun is breathtaking. By this I don’t mean the military hardware eagerly lent to Tom Cruise, but the way it saturates global cinema. You don’t have much choice but Top Gun if you want to watch a film for the next month.

There are 18 screenings a day at my local cinema, and it is showing in at least 24,000 cinemas simultaneously around the world. It would be absurd to take its success at the box office as a mark of quality when it is guaranteed.

The critical response, including in this paper, is overwhelmingly positive, and the audience is already in the millions. But how much of that audience have awareness of the politics that is driving the show?

The explicitly political agenda that is expressed in Top Gun flashes by so quickly that it doesn’t even leave contrails or a sonic boom. No-one mentions it, but it is stealth bombed into the first 15 minutes, unquestioned, and permeates the entire narrative.

Stay alert. Blink and you miss it. The mission is: “To take out an enemy target… as agreed with the partners of the Nato alliance.” You only get it once, but there it is – the word Nato.

The plot, therefore, is to lead this so-called “defensive” and “international” alliance into a hostile strike beyond its borders. The identity of Nato is employed to justify entirely US (no “allies” ever appear) world-dominating, opportunistic militarism.

That message is not even subliminal. It is explicit, and Top Gun is using the dominance of the US cinema industry to normalise it.

The message that the US has superior weapons and is coming to get you if you mount any show of resistance is naked imperialism and, of course, lathered with narcissistic Hollywood make-believe. This is the whole idea that to fly such techno-heavy arcade machines is an act of individual courage and skill. It isn’t.

But if we are to swallow the pill, to “surrender” to it as Guardian critics Kermode and Bradshaw meekly confessed they did, then you need gut-busting quantities of Coke to wash it down.

But is it really that good? For an action film, does it come as a surprise that the protagonists spend most of their time sitting down? Sitting to be lectured, sitting and giving orders. Sitting on barstools and motorbikes. Sitting in cockpits. US imperialism is conducted, it seems, from the armchair.

The jolly homoerotic romp that was the first Top Gun was created as a recruitment tool, and inflated applications to the US Navy’s aviation division by 500 per cent. The film premiered in 1986, before the end of the Cold War.

The purpose of Top Gun Maverick is different: this is a film in the era of hot war, and entirely aggressive. The aim is not recruitment. The aim is to subdue the colonised. To make them buy US product. And to normalise the idea that the task of Nato is to take out a dehumanised enemy target.

And the cost of bludgeoning a global audience into submission to this imperialist agenda is that the film is boringly, stupidly heteronormative.

In the meantime the anodyne homunculus Tom Cruise has stubbornly refused to age. Is the cinema screen the mirror for this Dorian Gray in aviator shades, and does he have a portrait somewhere of a bitter old queen, quaking with PTSD?

To explain the strangeness of a 59-year-old acting like a teenager the film commits its only serious gaffe. His imaginary career 1986-2022 is summarised as “ya, know… Bosnia, Iraq.” What was the need for his skills in those wars, one wonders?

In the summer of 1998 I met a Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) volunteer in Ljubljana, by chance. The KLA had been listed as a terrorist organisation, but for all its documented human rights abuses it was reclassified. The man I met was part of Operation Arrow in May 1999 when Nato “supported” the lightly armed KLA offensive up the Prizren Valley. He was still reeling from what happened next.

The Serbs knew about the offensive and were ready, while the KLA were willing, if unwitting pawns in the game of creating what was called, in the nauseating rhetoric of the time, a “target-rich environment.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/inatl/longterm/balkans/stories/military060299.html)

Nato intended to prove its supremacy over the dithering UN and the incompetent Europeans and the Serbs were frustratingly good at avoiding aerial assault, the only thing Nato was good at.

So, a battle loomed, and suddenly there it was: the 10 minutes necessary for Tom Cruise and Co to swoop in and deliver the blow, as it is claimed, that would topple Milosevic and surrender the whole region to US control. Or “open it up,” as Bill Clinton put it. For the US this was the Hiroshima-in-miniature with which they would end the war, and they later confessed to using depleted uranium (https://www.un.org/press/en/2000/20000322.hab163.doc.html).

William Blum, the US anti-imperialist commentator noted: “Nobody has ever suggested that Serbia had attacked, or was preparing to attack a member state of Nato, and that is the only event which justifies a reaction under the Nato treaty.”

“The sky opened,” said the man, “and the mountain exploded.” He was dazzled, dazed and eager to emigrate to the US. And I have never found a historical account of the battle.

Except Top Gun.