[native_samples]

That's why the new Top Gun is such a monster at the box office. It's a "woke zero" movie in which you believe the characters are actually competent because you watch them train. They're believable and you want them to succeed. It's just a fantastic action movie and is even better than the original. A great reminder of what Hollywood can do when it's firing on all cylinders and isn't distracted by trying to do ideological brainwashing.

[harpersealtako]

I think you're right. A lot of times in modern movies, the plot, setting, and characters exist solely to advance the ideology it is trying to push. Because ideology is a ideal of real life that almost by definition is incomplete, the plot/setting/characters feel inconsistent, and the illusion of internal logic is broken. For example, a character might do or say something that is inconsistent with reality purely in order to push a certain message, and it's really obvious what's happening. It's like if you're watching an action flick and the actor suddenly turns to the camera, smiles, and says "and that's why kids shouldn't do drugs". It pulls you out of the story -- even if you agree with the ideology.

[takinola]

Oh what I would give to be able to experience a world where the movie flopped. The same people claiming it was successful because it didn't try to be woke would have said it failed for being too woke (female pilots, multi-ethnic crew, unnamed enemy, etc).

[native_samples]

That's a curious inversion of cause/effect. You're suggesting people have latched onto this movie specifically and are trying to "claim" it as non woke even though it's not? There are plenty of movies that do well at the box office yet get panned for being super woke, why this one specifically?

No no, that's all wrong. A typical Hollywood woke Top Gun Maverick would have looked very different. The movie would be oriented around a female hero who is constantly being harassed or undermined by jealous men, who then get told they're dinosaurs and a relic of a previous non-woke era. At some point a frustrated white man would attack one of the women who would inexplicably turn out to be a black belt in karate (never previously mentioned), and the much larger and stronger man would thus end up on his back within three seconds. The commanders would all have been black (instead of just one in a relatively minor supporting role), and Maverick himself would either have been Chief Dinosaur, relegated to a loser's watching position at the end for his white male crimes, or - just as likely these days - replaced by a black actor without comment.

Top Gun Maverick is being more or less universally described as a non woke film. The fact that it has women and black people in it doesn't change that, because - and this is really important - anti-woke people are not racist nor sexist. That's the core reason for the whole culture war! The racism and sexism comes from woke people who are really open that they hate "white men", yet who claim it's everyone else animated by racial/gender hatred. That's why you're struggling to understand why a film can be hailed as non-woke yet still feature a mixed cast.

Maverick is non-woke for a whole bunch of reasons. Firstly, the cast is realistic. The US military is primarily made up of American men, and most American men are white with a large minority of Latino and African-Americans. Maverick depicts this reality accurately, or at least, accurately enough for film goers to accept it as such. Most of the pilots and Navy staff are white men, with a minority who aren't. They are usually married and if they aren't, they'd quite like to be married. Likewise, although women are now allowed in historically that wasn't the case and so it seems realistic that there's only one. None of them are inexplicably better than the others for identity reasons.

Secondly, the script lacks ideology. The characters don't make speeches about how the world should be. They don't try to remake the own world in a 'better' image, mutiny for moral reasons or any other of the stock clichés of woke storytelling. The characters are just professionals who focus on training, and ultimately just soldiers, so they complete the assigned mission without asking too many questions.

This lack of ideology is not merely replacing woke ideology with another. It is a genuine lack. Although the military in question is without a doubt the American military, there is almost no USA! USA! rah-rah. Baseball talk is kept to an absolute minimum. It's not a woke leftist film, but it's also not a Republican dream movie either. The pilots just ... train and fight. It's thus very interesting that you picked the unnamed enemy as a woke script aspect because it didn't seem that way to me at all. Woke people are never shy about naming the groups they hate! It's a slightly jarring stylistic choice, at least at first, but I don't think the script could have worked any other way. For the story to make sense you have to believe they're (a) not in the middle of WW3 (b) they're fighting an enemy that doesn't have nuclear weapons and won't start WW3 if their airspace is violated and yet also (c) has more advanced fighter jet tech than the USA. There are no countries that match this set of criteria. The best match for the unnamed enemy is IMHO clearly Iran: the extreme tactics used to prevent uranium enrichment, the mountainous terrain etc. But it's unbelievable that they'd have military tech than the USA. Someone else I talked to who saw the movie thought it was clearly meant to be China. The enemy ends up being a blank slate because filling it with details would have reduced the movie's focus on the action and created irreconcilable plot holes, not because woke people are so caring and reluctant to pick a fight!