Heroes, Hegemony, and Resistance: A Postcolonial Reading of Top Gun: Maverick, RRR, and Avatar

Introduction

Cinema is not merely a form of entertainment; it is also a powerful medium through which ideas about nation, empire, power, identity, and resistance are created and circulated. Action films often make political conflict emotionally appealing by presenting military power as courage, foreign intervention as moral duty, and national dominance as protection. At the same time, films about anti-colonial or indigenous resistance may make marginalised communities visible while still controlling how their histories and struggles are represented.

This blog is based on and inspired by two important pre-print articles by Dr. Dilip Barad: “Heroes or Hegemons? The Celluloid Empire of Rambo and Bond in America’s Geopolitical Narrative” and “Reimagining Resistance: The Appropriation of Tribal Heroes in Rajamouli’s RRR.” Barad’s articles encourage readers to examine popular cinema critically and to ask whether cinematic heroes simply entertain audiences or also carry the cultural and political values of powerful nations.

Using postcolonial thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, this blog examines three major films: Top Gun: Maverick (2022), RRR (2022), and Avatar (2009). The first section studies how Top Gun: Maverick transforms American military intervention into heroic spectacle. The second section considers how RRR and Avatar represent tribal and indigenous resistance, while also raising questions about appropriation, nationalism, representation, and the white-saviour narrative.

The central question of this blog is: Who is allowed to become a hero, who is reduced to an enemy or a victim, and whose voice remains unheard in popular cinema?

Brief Note on Dr. Dilip Barad’s Articles

This blog uses the critical frameworks developed by Dr. Dilip Barad in his articles on cinematic hegemony and the appropriation of tribal heroes. His discussion of Rambo, James Bond, and RRR helps us understand that films are not politically neutral. They can shape public imagination by making empire appear protective, military power appear heroic, and marginalised communities appear visible only through dominant nationalist or Western narrative structures.

Rather than repeating Dr. Barad’s arguments, this blog applies his postcolonial approach to Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar. It explores how these films use spectacle, emotion, masculinity, technology, nature, and heroic leadership to influence the audience’s understanding of power and resistance.

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Article 1: Heroes or Hegemons? The Celluloid Empire of Rambo and Bond in America's Geopolitical Narrative

From Rambo to Maverick: Hollywood, Hegemony, and the New American Empire

Popular cinema does much more than entertain. It creates emotionally convincing stories about who is heroic, who is dangerous, which nations must lead the world, and what kinds of violence appear necessary. Action films are particularly powerful because they turn geopolitics into spectacle: a national conflict becomes a personal battle, military intervention becomes moral duty, and the nation’s armed forces become the protectors of freedom. The article “Heroes or Hegemons: The Celluloid Empire of Rambo and Bond in America’s Geopolitical Narrative” offers an important postcolonial critique of this process. By discussing the figures of Rambo and James Bond, the article shows how popular cinema turns Western geopolitical power into an attractive heroic fantasy.

This blog applies the article’s framework to Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick (2022). Although the film appears to be a story about personal trauma, mentorship, aviation, and courage, it also constructs a powerful image of American military supremacy. Like Rambo and Bond films, Top Gun: Maverick presents American intervention as necessary, technologically advanced, and morally justified. A postcolonial reading reveals that the film’s real ideological work lies not only in what it shows  the heroism of American pilots  but also in what it refuses to show: the history, identity, civilians, and political viewpoint of the foreign country that becomes the target of U.S. military action.

Top Gun: Maverick

From Hero to Hegemon

The assigned article’s title asks an essential question: are action heroes genuinely independent individuals, or are they cinematic forms of hegemony? Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony helps answer this question. Hegemony is not maintained only through violence or political control. It also works through culture. Powerful states make their own interests appear normal, reasonable, and beneficial through schools, media, public rituals, and popular entertainment.

Rambo and Bond are not merely fictional individuals. Rambo represents the fantasy of American military strength, while Bond represents Britain’s continuing global authority after the formal collapse of the British Empire. The assigned article therefore encourages viewers to see action cinema as an ideological space where empire survives culturally even when colonial rule has officially ended.

Top Gun: Maverick continues this tradition. Its central character, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, is presented as rebellious, emotionally wounded, and personally brave. These qualities make him seem like an individual rather than a representative of the U.S. state. Yet this apparent individualism is precisely what makes the film’s ideology effective. Maverick’s personal courage humanises military power. The audience does not feel that it is watching a large institution exercise global dominance; instead, it feels that it is watching a flawed but noble man save his fellow pilots and protect the world.

The hero, therefore, becomes a hegemon. Maverick’s victory makes American military power appear ethical, necessary, and emotionally admirable.

The Invisible Enemy

The most politically revealing feature of Top Gun: Maverick is its unnamed enemy. The American pilots are sent to destroy an uranium-enrichment facility in a foreign country. However, the country is never clearly identified. Its history, culture, people, language, political leadership, and civilian population remain almost entirely absent from the narrative.

This absence is not accidental. It allows the film to avoid difficult questions. If the enemy had a name, viewers might ask why the United States is conducting a military mission against it. They might ask whether there are civilians near the nuclear facility, whether diplomacy has failed, whether the attack violates sovereignty, or whether American national interests are involved. By keeping the country anonymous, the film transforms a geopolitical act into a simple moral mission.

The enemy is represented mainly through military technology: fighter jets, helicopters, missiles, air bases, and armed guards. It does not appear as a society of human beings. This is close to Edward Said’s idea of Orientalism. Said argues that Western cultural representations often construct non-Western societies as irrational, dangerous, silent, and unknowable. The “East” or the foreign world becomes a space to be controlled, studied, feared, or rescued, rather than a place populated by people with political agency.

In Top Gun: Maverick, the foreign nation is not even granted the complexity of being an enemy with a perspective. It exists only as a threat to American security. The United States, in contrast, receives full emotional depth: its pilots have families, fears, friendships, regrets, memories, and moral conflicts. American life matters narratively; the enemy’s life does not.

This unequal distribution of humanity is one of the most important features of imperial cinema.

War as Spectacle

The film’s climactic mission is visually exhilarating. Maverick and his young pilots fly through a dangerous mountain route, evade missiles, destroy the target, and survive against impossible odds. The speed, music, camera movement, and aerial photography invite viewers to experience the mission as exciting and heroic.

However, spectacle can make violence politically invisible. The audience is encouraged to admire the skill of the pilots rather than consider the consequences of the attack. The destruction of a foreign military facility becomes a technical achievement: Can Maverick fly low enough? Can the team avoid the missiles? Can they return safely?

The question should be different: What does it mean for one powerful nation to enter another nation’s airspace and destroy its infrastructure?

This is where the film resembles Rambo III. In Rambo III, Afghanistan becomes a Cold War battlefield where the American hero can demonstrate moral strength against Soviet brutality. The complexity of Afghan history is reduced to a simple conflict between freedom and tyranny. Rambo appears to help Afghan people, but the film makes Afghanistan meaningful primarily because it provides a setting for American heroism. The story is not about Afghan self-determination; it is about America’s ability to imagine itself as the defender of freedom. Rambo III places its American protagonist in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, simplifying a complex conflict into a rescue narrative.academic.oup+1

Similarly, Top Gun: Maverick makes foreign territory meaningful mainly as a testing ground for American courage and technological superiority. The mission is called necessary, and the audience is not invited to challenge that description.

Militarised Masculinity

The film also connects national power with masculinity. Maverick is old, physically fearless, emotionally guarded, and resistant to authority. He is not a conventional bureaucrat; he is a risk-taking warrior. This image is important because it makes military violence seem masculine, authentic, and emotionally meaningful.

The younger pilots also undergo a process of transformation. They begin as competitive individuals but become a united military family under Maverick’s leadership. The film suggests that true maturity comes through discipline, sacrifice, obedience, and combat. Military service is therefore represented not merely as a profession but as a path to emotional redemption.

A postcolonial critique must ask why national identity is so often expressed through the armed male body. In both Rambo films and Bond films, masculinity becomes a metaphor for Western dominance. The hero’s body can cross borders, defeat enemies, survive torture, master technology, and protect the nation. This figure suggests that global order depends on the strength of the Western male hero.

Conclusion: The Empire of Common Sense

Top Gun: Maverick is a highly effective film because it combines nostalgia, action, emotion, and visual spectacle. It makes its audience admire courage, loyalty, sacrifice, and skill. Yet a postcolonial reading reveals that these emotions also serve an ideological purpose. The film normalises American military intervention by presenting the United States as the unquestioned defender of global security and by erasing the humanity of the foreign nation it attacks.

The article on Rambo and Bond helps us understand that popular heroes can become vehicles of hegemony. They are not simply characters; they are symbols through which powerful nations imagine themselves as protectors, rescuers, and moral leaders. In a globalised world shaped by war, drones, media propaganda, military alliances, and unequal power, viewers must learn to ask difficult questions of cinematic heroes. Who is being protected? Who is being attacked? Who is allowed to speak? And whose suffering disappears behind the thrill of victory?

Article 2: Reimagining Resistance: The Appropriation of Tribal Heroes in Rajamouli's RRR

Avatar, RRR, and the Politics of Indigenous Resistance: Who Speaks for the Subaltern?

Cinema often gives audiences the feeling that they are witnessing resistance. A heroic character rises against oppression, confronts an empire, saves a community, and defeats an apparently invincible enemy. Such narratives can inspire viewers because they make injustice visible. Yet postcolonial criticism teaches us that representation is never simple. A film may celebrate indigenous or tribal resistance while still controlling, simplifying, or appropriating the voices of the people it claims to represent.

The article “Reimagining Resistance: The Appropriation of Tribal Heroes in Rajamouli’s RRR” raises this important issue through its discussion of Komaram Bheem. Rajamouli’s RRR transforms Bheem, a historical Gond leader, into a spectacular anti-colonial hero. The film gives Bheem cultural visibility and portrays British colonialism as racist and violent. However, it also reshapes his historically specific tribal struggle into a larger nationalist fantasy of unity. This blog uses the article’s framework to analyse James Cameron’s Avatar (2009). Like RRR, Avatar powerfully represents indigenous resistance against imperial extraction. Yet it also raises a major postcolonial problem: the Na’vi people can resist colonial violence only after a human outsider, Jake Sully, becomes their central military leader.

Thus, both RRR and Avatar ask us to consider a difficult question: when mainstream cinema celebrates indigenous resistance, does it empower marginalised communities  or does it make their struggle acceptable only when it is transformed through dominant cultural forms?

RRR and the Appropriation of Komaram Bheem

The article on RRR is concerned with the relationship between history, cinema, and appropriation. Komaram Bheem was a Gond tribal leader associated with struggles against exploitation, feudal authority, and the control of tribal land and resources. His resistance emerged from a particular historical and regional context. He was not simply a general symbol of Indian freedom; he represented the political aspirations of Gond and Adivasi communities.

In RRR, however, Bheem is transformed into a mythic action hero. The film imagines a friendship between Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju, even though the two historical figures did not meet. Their real struggles took place in different regions and contexts. This fictional meeting allows the film to create a moving story of national unity: the tribal hero and the anti-colonial revolutionary join together against British oppression.simple.wikipedia+1

The film’s anti-colonial message is powerful. The British rulers treat Indians with contempt, and Malli’s abduction exposes colonial racism. The rescue of Malli is not only a personal mission for Bheem; it symbolises the defence of a community’s dignity. Through Bheem’s courage, the film gives viewers a memorable image of tribal resistance.

However, the article’s concern about appropriation remains valid. Bheem’s Gond identity is visible mainly through costume, music, forest imagery, dance, and physical strength. These elements make tribal identity visually attractive, but they can also reduce it to spectacle. The historical Bheem’s political concerns  land, forest rights, taxation, exploitation, and tribal autonomy  receive far less attention than the heroic action scenes.

The film gives Bheem visibility, but visibility is not the same as self-representation.

Avatar

Pandora as a Colonial Frontier

James Cameron’s Avatar presents a similar structure. The film is set on Pandora, a moon inhabited by the Na’vi, an indigenous people whose land is threatened by a human mining corporation. The human colonisers want to extract a valuable mineral, unobtanium, from land that includes the Na’vi’s sacred Hometree. The company’s language is the language of development, profit, security, and progress. The Na’vi’s land becomes valuable not because of its cultural or ecological meaning but because it contains a resource desired by outsiders.

This is a familiar colonial pattern. Colonial powers frequently described indigenous land as empty, underused, primitive, or available for development. In reality, indigenous land is often deeply connected with culture, ancestral memory, livelihood, spirituality, and collective survival. The coloniser sees land as property; the indigenous community experiences land as relation.

Avatar makes this conflict emotionally clear. The Na’vi are connected to forests, animals, ancestors, and a living ecological network called Eywa. The human military, by contrast, is associated with machines, helicopters, guns, laboratories, and extractive capitalism. The visual contrast is deliberate: Pandora is green, organic, spiritual, and interconnected, while the human base is metallic, industrial, polluted, and militarised.

The film therefore criticises colonial capitalism. It shows that empire is not only about political control; it is also about extraction. Land, minerals, forests, water, and labour become resources for powerful outsiders. In this respect, Avatar offers a useful environmental postcolonial critique.

The White-Saviour Problem

Yet Avatar also contains a major contradiction. Although the Na’vi are the people whose land is stolen and whose community is attacked, the narrative centres on Jake Sully, a disabled human former marine. Jake enters Na’vi society through an avatar body, learns their language and customs, falls in love with Neytiri, and finally becomes a major leader of their military resistance.

This is the film’s central postcolonial limitation. The indigenous community possesses knowledge, culture, courage, and military skill, but the narrative still gives the decisive heroic role to an outsider. Jake becomes the person who unites clans, rides the powerful Toruk, leads the final battle, and defeats the human invaders.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s question  “Can the subaltern speak?”  is helpful here. The Na’vi do speak in the literal sense. They have language, rituals, political leaders, and resistance strategies. Yet the film makes their struggle fully visible to global audiences through Jake’s transformation. The audience is invited to identify with him because he begins as a human outsider and gradually becomes sympathetic to the Na’vi. But this narrative choice also suggests that indigenous suffering becomes important only when a white or Western protagonist recognises it.

This is similar to the problem identified in RRR. Bheem is given great power and dignity, but his tribal community is often represented as a background to the male hero’s journey. In Avatar, the Na’vi are central visually, but their resistance is finally validated through the conversion and leadership of Jake Sully.

From Pandora to Ken Betwa

The political significance of Avatar becomes clearer when connected with contemporary environmental struggles. The Ken Betwa river-linking project has generated resistance among Adivasi communities concerned about displacement, the submergence of villages, loss of forest-linked livelihoods, compensation, and rehabilitation. The language of large development projects often promises public benefit  water, irrigation, jobs, infrastructure, and national progress. But postcolonial environmental criticism asks whose interests are prioritised and who bears the cost.

For Adivasi communities, forests and rivers are not merely natural resources. They are places of memory, livelihood, worship, kinship, and identity. Removing a community from its land cannot be understood merely as relocation. It can mean the destruction of a social world.

The protests surrounding the Ken Betwa project show that indigenous resistance is not only a historical subject for films. Tribal women and affected communities have used symbolic protests, including Chita Satyagraha and Phansi Satyagraha, to express their fear of displacement and demand recognition of their rights. These protests resemble the central conflict in Avatar: powerful institutions describe extraction or development as necessary, while indigenous communities insist that land cannot be separated from life.downtoearth.   

However, unlike the Na’vi in Avatar, real Adivasi communities do not have a foreign hero who arrives to save them. Their resistance depends upon their own leadership, collective knowledge, legal struggle, protest, solidarity, and political voice. This difference is crucial. Cinema may inspire sympathy, but it should not make indigenous people dependent on heroic outsiders.

Conclusion: Beyond Spectacle

Both RRR and Avatar are emotionally powerful films of resistance. They expose colonial violence and make audiences feel the injustice of land theft, racism, and oppression. RRR celebrates Komaram Bheem’s courage against British power, while Avatar condemns corporate militarism and environmental destruction.

Yet postcolonial criticism asks us to go beyond celebration. In RRR, tribal resistance is absorbed into a nationalist spectacle. In Avatar, indigenous resistance is centred through a human outsider who becomes the main hero. These films show resistance, but they also reveal how mainstream cinema often controls the form in which resistance becomes visible.

The most ethical postcolonial cinema would not only use tribal or indigenous communities as symbols of bravery, nature, or suffering. It would allow them to appear as complex political subjects with their own histories, voices, disagreements, ecological knowledge, and visions of the future. The lesson for today’s globalised world is clear: we must listen not only to cinematic heroes but also to real communities defending their forests, rivers, land, and right to self-determination.

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Works Cited

• Avatar. Directed by James Cameron, performances by Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, and Stephen Lang, 20th Century Fox, 2009.
• Barad, Dilip. “Heroes or Hegemons? The Celluloid Empire of Rambo and Bond in America’s Geopolitical Narrative.” ResearchGate, 2024, www.researchgate.net/publication/383415195_Heroes_or_Hegemons_The_Celluloid_Empire_of_Rambo_and_Bond_in_America’s_Geopolitical_Narrative  .
• Barad, Dilip. “Reimagining Resistance: The Appropriation of Tribal Heroes in Rajamouli’s RRR.” Dilip Barad | Teacher Blog, 31 Aug. 2024, blog.dilipbarad.com/2024/08/reimagining-resistance-appropriation-of.html. Accessed 27 Aug. 2026. 
• Barad, Dilip. “Reimagining Resistance: The Appropriation of Tribal Heroes in Rajamouli’s RRR.” ResearchGate, 2024, www.researchgate.net/publication/383603395_Reimagining_Resistance_The_Appropriation_of_Tribal_Heroes_in_Rajamouli’s_RRR .
• Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, International Publishers, 1971.
• “Ken-Betwa Link Project, Phase-I.” Forest Clearance, Government of India, forestsclearance.nic.in/DownloadPdfFile.aspx?FileName=3112112491217HIEO6RevisedRRPlan.pdf&FilePath=../writereaddata/FormA/Displacement/. Accessed 27 Aug. 2026.
• “Ken-Betwa Project: Tribal Women Stage Pyre Protest against Forced Displacement.” Down To Earth, 13 Apr. 2026, downtoearth.org.in/environment/ken-betwa-project-tribal-women-stage-pyre-protest-in-protest-against-displacement. Accessed 27 Aug. 2026.
• Rambo III. Directed by Peter MacDonald, performances by Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, and Marc de Jonge, TriStar Pictures, 1988.
• RRR. Directed by S. S. Rajamouli, performances by N. T. Rama Rao Jr., Ram Charan, Alia Bhatt, and Ajay Devgn, DVV Entertainment, 2022.
• Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–313.
• Top Gun: Maverick. Directed by Joseph Kosinski, performances by Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, and Val Kilmer, Paramount Pictures, 2022.

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