In Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise’s character must train a team of hotshot pilots to take out a facility in an unnamed country with snow-covered mountains. Were they training for a mission in Switzerland? Hollywood was so wary of having any villains identified in this one that pilots from the generic foreign adversary were literally faceless. Maverick was actually a better film than the original Top Gun —rewatch the original before complaining — but one aspect of the original that far surpassed the sequel was the thrill of seeing Cruise flip the bird to his clearly identified Russian adversaries.

This is, unfortunately, but one example of a larger trend of Hollywood being unable or unwilling to specify who actually are the villains out there in the world any more. It’s a sharp break from the past. In the 1940s and 1950s, both during and after World War II, Nazis were clear villains, rightly portrayed as scheming, cruel, and duplicitous. During the Cold War, Hollywood correctly saw the Soviet Union as the world’s true bad guy, led by the KGB. In dozens of movies from the 1960s through the 1990s, the KGB was a nefarious force, looking to harm America and its allies. In The Manchurian Candidate (1962), the KGB brainwashes an American soldier to be an assassin. In Avalanche Express (1979), KGB agents try to stop a Soviet general, played by Robert Shaw, from defecting. In No Way Out (1987), Kevin Costner plays a Navy officer searching for a KGB mole within the U.S. government. Once the Cold War ended, KGB agents showed up less frequently on screen, but for three decades, they were formidable, ruthless, and detestable villains.

In the post-Cold War era, Hollywood dropped the KGB and has groped ever since for discernible baddies. Movies set in the past — think Indiana Jones — can, of course, always keep using Nazis. But for decades now, Hollywood has been largely unable to identify any group that makes for good villain fodder when stories are set in the present, even though there are real and openly declared enemies of the West.