Top Gun’s Villain: Who Maverick & Iceman Are Fighting

Top Gun is one of the quintessential eighties movies, so it is surprising that it is never actually revealed who Maverick and Iceman are fighting in the film’s action-packed finale. Top Gun is mainly about the relationships between the different fighter pilots, meaning that the country that they are fighting isn’t essential to the film’s plot. However, they have to be fighting someone, and who that is can be found by digging into the history of Top Gun.

Top Gun follows Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) as he joins the Top Gun Naval Fighter Weapons School to pursue his dream of being a fighter pilot. Maverick’s hotshot attitude puts him at odds with some of the other members of the team, most notably Iceman (Val Kilmer). Since its release, Top Gun has become a staple of the pop culture ethos, with its long-awaited sequel Top Gun: Maverick (after some development trouble) coming soon.

In Top Gun‘s exciting climax, Maverick, Iceman, and another pilot named Hollywood take on two hostile MiGs. Hollywood is quickly shot down, but Maverick and Iceman shoot down four of the jets, causing the other two to flee. This is a favorite scene to many fans, but when asked, most can’t name where the hostile MiGs came from. This actually makes sense, because the film never says who the hostiles are. However, the evidence in the film and the evidence from Top Gun‘s creators leads to two different possibilities: they are either from the USSR or North Korea.

The assumption most viewers have when watching Top Gun is that the enemy combatants are Soviet. For one, the jets are MiG-28s, a model that was flown by the Soviets at the time. Furthermore, many films at the time made people from the USSR the enemy, as seen in films like Rocky IV with Ivan Drago and Red Dawn. This trend is due to real-world conflicts between the US and the USSR at the time, such as the Cold War. Because of this prevailing trend, mny audiences at the time – and even later on – may have just assumed the combatants are Soviet. While this may be what the final version of Top Gun wants the viewer to believe, those behind the film push a decidedly different theory.

The second theory states that the combatants are not Soviet, but North Korean. The main evidence for this theory comes from the Special Edition’s DVD commentary. The commentary features Top Gun director Tony Scott, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, co-writer Jack Epps Jr., and several technical advisors. In the commentary, the film’s creators actually reveal that the enemy combatants at the end were originally intended to be North Korean. However, the State Department (who consulted on the film) was trying to normalize relations with North Korea at the time and told the filmmakers not to use them. Thus, they don’t specify who the enemies are, leaving it open to interpretation.  One more wrench is thrown into things, though. In Top Gun‘s script, the main characters are warned that the combatant’s MiG-28s are armed with AM 39 Exocet missiles. While this seems like an innocuous detail, these anti-aircraft missiles are actually French-made, meaning neither country should have them. While the identity of who Maverick and Iceman fight at the end of Top Gun is intentionally left vague, it is always interesting to debate who they might be.

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