Readers, I have a little confession to make: up until last week, I’d never watched Tony Scott’s Top Gun from beginning to end. Yes, I’d seen parts of the film here and there on television, but I’d never actually sat down for the purpose of actually watching Top Gun in its entirety. However, I was familiar enough with the film by reputation and through hearing others talk about it that I was fairly sure I wasn’t missing much. Yet the film was so popular in its day that it was almost inevitable that I would be writing it up for a column sooner or later. So in writing this week’s column, I wouldn’t be simply reviewing Top Gun on its own merits, but viewing it through the prism of its pop-cultural impact- not normally the way to review a movie, but more or less the modus operandi here at Yesterday’s Hits.  So get ready to take a ride on the highway to... the danger zone!

Why was Top Gun a hit?: In the days of Old Hollywood, the big splashy entertainments were usually distinguished by their sheer magnitude, with towering sets, far-flung locations, and the proverbial “cast of thousands”. But all of this changed in the 1970s, when directors like Spielberg and Lucas made hugely popular blockbusters that were distinguished less by their largesse than for their momentum. By the time 1986 rolled around, audiences were feeling the need for speed, and Top Gun delivered. Top Gun boasted eye-popping aerial photography and combat sequences that rivaled almost anything that had been shown onscreen up to that point, and allowed the U.S. Navy to show off some of their most state-of-the-art fighter planes.

But if audiences came for the jets, they stuck around to witness the birth of a new superstar, Tom Cruise. Cruise had made a big impression three years prior in Risky Business, but it was Top Gun that propelled his career into the stratosphere. Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell isn’t a great role, but it was tailor made to Cruise’s onscreen persona- boyish, driven, confident, almost impossibly handsome. Maverick such was a quintessential eighties hero (his goal: to be “the best of the best”) and so successfully did Cruise fit the role that he represented the kind of man who women wanted to be with and men wanted to be like. Top Gun became the runaway hit of 1986, taking in $176 million in the United States alone. In addition, the film became an invaluable recruiting tool for the Navy, which stationed recruiters outside of many theatres, resulting in an almost unprecedented number of applications.

What happened?: After its theatrical release, Top Gun became a sizable hit on home video and maintained most of its popularity through the end of the decade. However, by the time the nineties rolled around, the alpha-male lifestyle and master-of-the-universe mindset of the eighties had fallen out of fashion, and movies like Top Gun became more interesting for their kitsch value than as entertainment.

Consider the whole Tarantino issue. In the 1994 indie Sleep With Me, Tarantino expounded upon a theory that posited Top Gun as a movie about Maverick struggling with his homosexuality. How well the theory holds up when watching the film is almost immaterial- although scenes like the infamous volleyball game, in which Cruise, Val Kilmer and Rick Rossovich all play shirtless and covered in sweat as Kenny Loggins sings “Playing With the Boys” on the soundtrack certainly don’t discourage this interpretation. But what’s important is how alien the un-ironic brand of manliness in the film translated to the more self-aware age, and how cheesy it all feels in retrospect. Even now, when we can’t look back at the eighties without a certain snickering nostalgia, Top Gun isn’t remotely the manly-man classic it set out to be.

Does Top Gun still work?: Not really. For such a mammoth box office hit, there really isn’t much to Top Gun. The movie’s storyline, such as it is, is just a framework on which to hang a series of flight sequences, interspersed with love scenes and bits of strutting-peacock machismo. From a visual standpoint, the movie’s still fairly exciting when the planes are in the air, but considering that most of these scenes are actually simulated missions rather than actual combat, there’s not a lot of tension to them. As the aviators battle to determine who will be Top Gun, the movie comes off a lot like a baseball movie in which most of the story is devoted to players in spring training duking it out for a spot on the roster. The real combat sequence at the end is considerably more exciting, but it’s too little, too late, once one realizes that the entire preceding ninety minutes have all essentially been the setup.

If the story is thin, the characters are even thinner. From Maverick on down, the people who populate the film are defined by one or two basic motivations. Maverick wants to be the best and discover what happened to his father. Charlie (Kelly McGillis) wants a big promotion in Washington, and to get closer to Maverick for various reasons. Iceman (Kilmer, clearly bored) wants to beat Maverick. The film’s only interesting character is Maverick’s “rear man” (heh heh) Goose, played by Anthony Edwards. Goose is best friends with Maverick and would follow him anywhere, but feels conflicted about risking his life in combat because he has a wife and kids. Naturally, Goose is doomed, but because we actually care about him as a person instead of just an action figure, his death is one of the few parts of the movie that makes an impression.

As a whole, Top Gun is curiously soulless. Looking back at the classics of the past that have truly endured, it’s clear that all of them were lovingly crafted, with the filmmakers taking a real emotional stake in the films they made. This isn’t the case with Top Gun, a movie in which every element is calculated and focus-grouped to appeal to the widest possible audience. For example, there’s the film’s love scene. Cruise and McGillis exhibit almost no chemistry or sexual tension throughout the film, yet test audiences complained about the lack of a love scene, so Scott shot one months after principal shooting was completed. The scene is so perfunctory that it doesn’t work except to satisfy an obligation to a formula, and much of the rest of the film feels the same way. No wonder the theory Tarantino voiced caught on- at least it gives audiences something to entertain themselves while the movie itself is on autopilot.

Oh, and in case you still haven’t seen it for yourself, here’s a clip of Tarantino from Sleep With Me sharing the Top Gun theory, coming to us through the magic of YouTube.



Yeah, Quentin gets the line wrong, but still- it's tough not to watch the film now without thinking "Swordfight! Swordfight!" at least once.