THE sheer scale of Top Gun is breathtaking. By this I don’t mean the military hardware eagerly lent to Tom Cruise, but the way it saturates global cinema. You don’t have much choice but Top Gun if you want to watch a film for the next month.

There are 18 screenings a day at my local cinema, and it is showing in at least 24,000 cinemas simultaneously around the world. It would be absurd to take its success at the box office as a mark of quality when it is guaranteed.

The critical response, including in this paper, is overwhelmingly positive, and the audience is already in the millions. But how much of that audience have awareness of the politics that is driving the show?