When a first-class reviewer like Stephanie Zacharek of Time magazine writes about the movie Top Gun: Maverick that it is easy to make peace with the men in it, you can’t help thinking: is patriarchy working its poison? Or American propaganda, perhaps?

Zacharek is too smart to have drunk from those cups, and does call the original Top Gun a “caveman relic  ... a high-flying fantasy populated with dude bros, before we even had a name for them”. But for Americans surrounded by technological wonders, it might be hard to see that, just like the original 1985 movie was Cold War cultural weaponry hard and true, the post-Covid-19 version celebrates US power as still alive and well and making noise in a cinema or on an aircraft carrier near you...

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