Forty years ago give or take, the summer of ’86 was taken over by a young Tom Cruise who hadn’t quite embraced the divine double chin of The Hubbard and Kenny Loggins deciding that what the decade really needed was more synth-laden guitar solos. We also established Jerry Bruckheimer’s mastery of producing films with expensive military hardware overlaid with barely contained abs-oiling machismo, and that’s why Top Gun still stands out as a pivotal homoerotic romantic film even in the Reagan era. Oh, and there’s also something about jet fighter dogfights. Let’s press on!
Cruise plays ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, a US Navy pilot who considers things like regulations to be entirely optional but gets away with it because he’s really good at taking airborne portraits. The love of his life—er, copilot, is Goose, played by Anthony Edwards, and you might make the mistake of thinking their relationship platonic. In fairness, Mitchell does go to some effort to hide it, as he’s still in the military circa the eighties and all that, and as such at a gala for the Top Gun flight school he joins he decides to make an ostensible move on Kelly McGillis, by, erm, barging into the bathroom with her. Again, I reiterate this is still the eighties, listen to some of the crap Motley Crue put out.
Still, McGillis’ Charlie has her pluses—she knows a lot about Soviet MiGs, and that apparently intrigues Maverick a lot. But we have other drama, like Van Kilmer as Iceman, so named because he seems to use cake icing to tip his hair. Iceman spends a lot of time showing off how easily he wears a towel in the locker room, trying to stir jealousy…I mean, trying to show off who’s the superior pilot.
Between all of this, and our obligatory flight scenes showing off close-up dogfights despite long-range missile combat being what was expected even then, you might forget this film’s reputation. And then we are slammed in the face with the most epic volleyball sequence put to film, with every muscle of our cast squeezed and stretched in full view of the camera, to the sound of ‘Playing With the Boys’. You tell me, what the hell kind of conclusion are we meant to make after this?!
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| You know, I'm not sure what, visually, the director is trying to communicate here... |
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| It's quite hard to tell, you see... |
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| Help me out here... |
Eventually, however, things go awry in one of our flight training moments, which involves a lot of Cruise staring very intently at this screen, like someone who’s seeing a ‘natural enhancement’ spam email appear, and is so intrigued despite knowing he really shouldn’t.
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| "What's that? Spend seventy bunillion dollars on excising my body thetans? Damn...such...a...fine...case you make..." |
Yes, spoilers, Goose ends up killed, and this devastates Maverick, to the point that his fling with Charlie is almost over. And, as the sequel film will confirm, he won’t get over it even for decades. Van Kilmer steps up, but we all know that you never quite love like the first time you fell for someone.
After this distressing torment of love and the heart, we finally get our obligatory battle with the forces of Yemen…North Korea…South Whateveristan. You might be impressed by what was still some intensely shot stunt flying for the pre-CGI era, but the real meat comes after, when Iceman pledges himself by promising to be his wingman any time, but we all know he’s not replacing Goose anytime soon.
So in seriousness…Top Gun is a stupendously cheesy movie, but cheesy in the best possible sense where every gloriously memorable song accentuates the drama of sexy men who get shirtless every other scene when they’re not exploding jets. They made an objectively superior followup years later, but this is the kind of shit that, rightly or wrongly, they really can’t make anymore!
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