Tom Cruise eats afterburners and shits sonic booms. The admiral, played by steely Ed Harris, who has looked the same age for even longer than Tom Cruise, is nicknamed “The Drone Ranger,” and he’s determined to shut down this wasteful program, using the fact that they’re behind schedule on hitting their benchmarks for speed as his excuse. Knights made sense as an avatar, regardless of how actually useful they were.Ī similar kind of impending obsolescence and stubborn chivalry suffuses Top Gun: Maverick, which in the very first scene sees its title character (played by Tom Cruise) trying to justify an experimental fighter program to a disapproving admiral. Knights were society’s most glorious gloryboys, and watching them clatter around on their gigantic horses wearing hundreds of pounds of shiny plate armor was an impressive spectacle that no one wanted to give up, no matter how many times they got aerated by commoners with longbows or drowned themselves falling into waist-deep rivers or whatever.

In the middle ages, European armies kept investing in heavy cavalry charges long after it had already proven ineffective as a battle strategy, presumably for one simple reason: it looked cool.