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The need for speed: why China and India are fast-tracking their own Top Gun remakes
State of the art tech, exciting action sequences, swaggering young heroes … it’s no surprise that the world’s new superpowers have fallen for blockbuster air force films. But can they be anything more than military propaganda?
The air force flick remains the ne plus ultra of military film-making; pure cinematic surface, those gleaming Ray-Bans and pristine contrails breezily aestheticising the modern superpower’s elite capability. Focusing, like Top Gun, on a group of trainee pilots, the mission objective is chiding the unspecified foreign powers displaying a lamentably casual attitude to Chinese airspace, such as the two interlopers who declare, with American accents, in the intro: “We can come and go whenever we want.” It is also there to put the country’s J-20 stealth fighter in the shop window. So it probably won’t be some hard-hitting exposé of military inculcation methods, with Roshan not quite having the superstar immunity that has allowed the actor Shah Rukh Khan to make statements in his films that cut across the grain of pro-Hindi nationalism.
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