The Woke Answer To Top Gun Maverick

In 2022, after two years of burning cities and the mask police and Covid lockdowns and the AutoPen/Biden regime telling White men they were the real problem in America, most normies were looking for a “W” of some sort. They got that W in the form of a nostalgia heavy film bringing back one of the most beloved characters from 1980s cinema, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell played by Tom Cruise, in Top Gun Maverick.

The film was an enormous financial success, pulling in around $1.5 billion and making a profit (even after Tim Cruise’s enormous payday) of maybe $400 million. On the other hand, I didn’t think it was that great of a film. I reviewed it here: Film Review: Top Gun Maverick and was pretty unimpressed. When the opening notes play I will admit it transported me back to my youth and the first time seeing the original Top Gun. When that deep bell rings and the Top Gun theme starts and then segues into Danger Zone, it reminded me of that feeling every guy in the 1980s had of wanting to join the Navy and fly jets off aircraft carriers. After that it mostly was pretty forgettable. What made is successful was mostly nostalgia but also the lack of heavy handed “White men are evil” crap. It had loud music and jet fighters and a simplistic plot full of enormous holes plus a chubby black Warrant Officer that apparently is qualified for every job in the Navy.

All that to say that Hollywood made a movie that was targeted straight at older White guys and made a ton of money.

That was then and this is 2026 which brought us the polar opposite of Top Gun Maverick: Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey.

Right from the start, as soon as the casting choices were named, the memes started because they were so ridiculous given this was a movie based in ancient Greece. I talked about it a bit here after the first trailer dropped: The Face That Launched A Thousand Sheeeiiittts and the big kerfuffle was the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, a woman described as so beautiful her kidnapping triggered the Trojan War.

Seriously. The monkey noise random White girl from Ole Miss is 1000x prettier than Lupita Nyong’o who isn’t pretty at all.

The other big laugh was Ellen Page who played a Greek soldier named Sinon but looked for all the world like a little girl playing dress up, because that is what she was. It was even more laughable than the little mestizo girl in Terminator: Dark Fate. At least she was a little girl playing a little girl, instead of a little girl pretending to be a little boy.

The thing is, the film made an absolute ton of money with global box office receipts coming in north of $1.8 billion. The reviews were mostly positive and it has a rating of 8.4 on IMDb. I thought maybe it was good in spite of itself. Then it finally hit the “for people that refuse to pay to see movies” sites and I downloaded it, and just got around to watching it last night.

What a bleak dumpster fire.

It starts off with some random black guy named Travis Scott who I guess is famous banging a staff on a table and shouting out the story of Odysseus. Maybe it was supposed to be slam poetry or spoken word or something but it was dumb and having a black guy from America bellowing in black guy in America voice to start the movie ensured that you would never feel like you were watching a story about ancient Greece.

It went downhill from there.

At least it didn’t cost me anything but 3 hours of my life that I will never get back. There were some cool visuals but the movie dragged in a lot of places, the dialogue was dumb and littered with modern Americanism like “my dad” and most of the actors were mailing it in. Mostly it was dark and depressing with nothing heroic about it. One of the great heroic epics in human history was reduced to a grim tale with not a single redeeming characteristic and nothing but awful people being awful to each other. For all of it’s cheesiness at least Top Gun Maverick had people with real character arcs, genuine feelings, even some decent dialogue, and it didn’t make me want to cut myself after watching it.

I should have known better. I might have to rewatch Excalibur tonight to remind myself what a heroic epic is supposed to look like, and also what decent film making used to be.