US strikes Iran: How Tom Cruise's Top Gun: Maverick eerily predicted Donald Trump's Operation Midnight Hammer

Time of India

22-06-2025

When
Top Gun: Maverick
stormed theatres in 2022, it wasn't just a sequel—it was a resurrection. It defied every law of modern franchise gravity. No multiverse. No Marvel. No brooding they-them anti-hero.
Just the return of a square-jawed cis-American icon doing exactly what he did 36 years ago—only faster, louder, and with a bigger sonic boom, looking like the folks at Scientology had finally found the Fountain of Youth.
What made it work?
First, it respected the original. No irony. No winks. No smug Gen Z subtext. Tom Cruise didn't hand over the keys—he repossessed the plane, flew it through a canyon at Mach 1.6, and landed it on an aircraft carrier with his grin cryogenically preserved in confidence.
Kenny Loggins was still on standby. The soundtrack still slapped. The opening still had that slow-mo montage of jets and muscle, set to a synth-and-snare build-up so patriotic it practically handed you a Coors Light and called you "sir.
"
There was shirtless beach football. Beer without guilt. Bros being bros in the golden light of American masculinity.
Maverick
didn't just bring back a movie—it brought back a memory.
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Undo
Of the good old days, before drone warfare, before greyzone psyops, before movies needed three disclaimers and a trigger warning. A time when war was sexy, the rules were simple, and the only labels that mattered were 'friendly' and 'bogey on your six.'
Second, it was real. Practical stunts. Real G-forces. No Marvel mush or green-screen gibberish. You felt every dive, every roll, every breath in a cockpit that looked more like a coffin.
In an age of CGI fatigue, Maverick reminded viewers what cinema used to feel like—sweaty palms and pounding heartbeats, set to the scream of a jet engine.
But above all,
Top Gun: Maverick
gave audiences something even rarer: sincerity. It wasn't cynical. It wasn't ashamed of heroism. It put on aviators, turned up the volume, and said: "Let's go."
Top Gun Maverick Beach Scene 4K IMAX
And go it did—straight into the heart of America's foreign policy theatre. Because what looked like a nostalgia-fuelled testosterone trip in 2022 now feels like something far more uncanny in 2025. As President
Donald Trump
orders a massive stealth strike on Iran's Fordow nuclear facility,
Maverick
doesn't look like a movie anymore.
It looks like a propehcy.
A daring pre-emptive strike. An underground uranium plant. A ticking clock. A threat not to America, but to unnamed "allies in the region." What once felt like high-octane fantasy is now playing out, almost scene for scene, in the skies above the Middle East. And Tom Cruise? He wasn't just making a sequel. He was filming the trailer for Trump's next war.
The Anti-Woke Hit That Soared
When Maverick dropped, it didn't just break box-office records—it broke Hollywood's progressive chokehold on patriotism.
No identity politics. No postmodern angst. No war guilt disguised as character development. Just raw American adrenaline, jet-fuelled storytelling, and Tom Cruise doing what Tom Cruise does best—defying gravity and cultural trends alike.
Even Jon Hamm showed up, having shed the whiskey-soaked aura of Don Draper to play a tight-laced, by-the-book commander who looked like he personally banned pronouns from the base.
You could almost smell the Aqua Velva.
The cast was tailor-made for culture-war glory. Miles Teller stepped in as Rooster—Goose's mustachioed legacy—looking like he belonged on a recruitment poster for bros who bench for liberty. Monica Barbaro played Phoenix, the token female pilot who neither lectured nor got lectured—just flew like hell and left feminism on mute. Glen Powell's Hangman was Iceman 2.0: arrogant, tanned, and ready to drop a snide remark along with his payload.
Jennifer Connelly was there too, ageless and cool, running a bar where no one talks politics. No lectures. No apologies. Just call signs, dogfights, and sweat-drenched montages scored to the sound of American confidence.
Reagan Redux: Top Gun Was Always Propaganda
Top Gun (1986) Official Trailer - Tom Cruise Movie
The 1986
Top Gun
wasn't just a movie—it was Cold War propaganda with better hair. The Pentagon handed over carriers, jets, and script suggestions. Hollywood returned the favour by air-dropping a generation of recruits into Navy flight school.
It was recruitment wrapped in romance and set to guitar riffs.
Maverick followed the same flight path. The military offered full support. The Navy looked like gods. But this time, there was a twist: the enemy was unnamed. No Soviet MiGs. No al-Qaeda. Just a faceless rogue nation with a uranium facility in the mountains.
The target? An underground enrichment site. The mission? Destroy it before it becomes operational.
The threat? Not to America—but to our unnamed "allies in the region."
Nobody said Iran. Nobody said Israel. And yet everybody knew.
That narrative sleight of hand—so brazen in its vagueness—would soon feel less like creative license and more like strategic foreshadowing.
Scene for Scene: Trump's Iran Strike Mirrors the Film
In June 2025, President Trump—new term, same instincts—ordered a real-world operation that bore eerie resemblance to Maverick. Seven B-2 bombers took off from the US under the cloak of midnight.
The mission: Operation Midnight Hammer. The target: Iran's Fordow uranium enrichment facility, buried in the mountains near Qom. A site designed to withstand everything short of Armageddon. A site built for this very moment.
In Maverick, the enemy is never named, but the target is clear: a uranium plant in a GPS-jammed valley, surrounded by surface-to-air missiles and fifth-gen fighters. In real life, Fordow sits in a mountainous fortress, shielded by SAM batteries, jamming tech, and hardened bunkers.
In the film: three weeks become ten days become go-time. In reality: intel warned that Iran's enrichment programme was just days from a critical threshold.
And in both cases, the justification was identical: not America-first, but ally-defence. In Maverick, it's the vague protection of "our friends in the region." In 2025, Trump didn't even bother with euphemism—Israel was the subtext and subtext became text.
It wasn't a shot-for-shot remake.
But it was close enough to make even Cruise raise an eyebrow behind his aviators.
Whose War Is It Anyway?
What made Maverick eerie in hindsight was how little it bothered to justify the mission. No American hostages. No nukes pointed at New York. Just an unspoken understanding that someone else's red line was worth flying into.
And that's what the Right is now debating.
Why should American pilots risk their lives for foreign bunkers? Why should billion-dollar aircraft be dispatched to send messages on behalf of another democracy?
Maverick doesn't ask "why."
It only asks: "Can it be done?" That question, in 2025, is no longer rhetorical.
The Real Finale: A Flag, a Flyby… and a Fade to Black
Maverick ends like every great American military fantasy: mission accomplished, uranium plant obliterated, and Tom Cruise strutting across the tarmac with his abs and aircraft intact. The jets land. The music swells. The flag flutters in cinematic slow motion. It could have been lifted straight from the closing scene of Operation Midnight Hammer.
But imagine for a second that Maverick didn't make it. That he was shot down in that snowy canyon, dying for a target that never threatened his home, buried in a country he couldn't name, on a mission no one would claim. Would the audience still cheer? Would they even remember who the war was for?
This is the question now circling Washington like an unarmed drone—silent, discomfiting, and impossible to shoot down. When the justification for war is wrapped in vagueness, when the enemy is unnamed, and when "defending our allies" becomes the only plotline—how long before audiences, and voters, stop watching the show?
After all, wasn't this the very premise Trump once campaigned against? That MAGA would not behave like Bush-era neocons salivating for another war? That America's sons and daughters would no longer be deployed as global hall monitors in faraway deserts? Only last month in Saudi Arabia, Trump, trying to draw a red line between himself and Dubya, declared: 'In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built.
'
As David Remnick pointed out in a recent piece in
New Yorker
, Trump once echoed Bannon and Tucker Carlson when he said: 'In recent years, far too many American Presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it's our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.'
Top Gun: Maverick (2022) Dagger Attack Scene
And yet, here we are—seven stealth bombers later. A highly classified mission. A decoy formation. A multi-theatre deployment.
A strike not to defend American cities, but to send a message on behalf of regional allies. It may have looked like surgical precision from the skies—but on the ground, it's a policy contradiction wrapped in cinematic déjà vu.
Even the bill Trump signed to fund the strike—what he called a 'big, beautiful defence package'—flies in the face of MAGA's small-government gospel. This wasn't lean governance. It was big-budget interventionism, scored by swelling violins and paid for with a trillion-dollar cheque.
It ignited a backlash from his base—and a very public falling out with Elon Musk, who accused Trump of abandoning fiscal discipline for Pentagon theatrics.
Because it didn't start with a movie. It started with a massacre. On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters paraglided into southern Israel, launching the deadliest attack in the country's history. That single morning shattered illusions across the region. It led to a brutal war in Gaza.
It provoked the Houthis to enter the fray. It drew Hezbollah closer to the edge. And it hardened Israel's posture, setting off a chain reaction that eventually led the US to launch Operation Midnight Hammer.
From beach football to bunker busters, from afterburners to actual airstrikes—Top Gun began as propaganda. Maverick upgraded it into spectacle. And Trump's Operation Midnight Hammer may be the moment the reel became real.
The movie always had the jets. Reality just pressed play.
And if that doesn't make you pause—even if you're wearing aviators—just remember: Not even Tom Cruise can outrun a B-2 bomber. Though, to be fair, he'd probably try. On foot. While dangling off a missile. Smiling. As for the true MAGA believers—those who rallied behind promises of no more endless wars and a return to fiscal sanity—they're left asking the same question Maverick once did: Whose mission was this anyway?