Jeremy’s Tophunder №66: Top Gun

6 min readMay 5, 2020

There are people out there who will try to convince you that Top Gun is not a good movie.

Those people are wrong.

On the other hand, there are people out there who will try to convince you that Top Gun is a great movie.

Those people are also wrong.

Top Gun is amazing, but awesome in the same way that the Wendy’s Baconator and Coors Light and New York sports teams that aren’t the Yankees are awesome. Which is to say, they kinda aren’t. They’re awesome, but in a bad way. Or maybe they’re bad, but in an awesome way. They’re somehow both, and yet also somehow neither.

Top Gun is in a very rare class of movies. It’s decidedly better than the purely mindless blockbuster trash that gets released every summer, buy by a margin so thin that it often gets lumped into that group. It’s the cream of the crop of bad movies. It’s somehow grossly overrated and criminally underrated all at the same time. It just depends on who you’re talking to.

I like bad movies more than most people. Just the other day, I had an actual conversation about The Boondock Saints in which two adult human beings talked about (maybe) the worst movie of the 1990s as if it were a worthwhile piece of entertainment. I’ve seen The Room four times, and three of them were on purpose. I’ve seen most of the movies Adam Sandler has starred in over the last 10 years. I saw the 2010 A-Team in theaters and didn’t regret it. I re-watch the Star Wars prequels about once per year, just to make sure they’re still bad. My tolerance for objectively bad movies is way, way higher than most people I know. For that reason, and others, I really can’t find anything about Top Gun that isn’t endearing.

I will say, I’ve started watching Top Gun several more times than I’ve finished watching Top Gun. The thing is — for as much as I love Tom Cruise (he’s represented five times in my Top 100) — he’s somehow the worst part of the movie. Anthony Edwards (as Goose) is clearly the heart of the first 75 minutes or so, and actually might wipe the floor with actors like Cruise and Val Kilmer in a few scenes. He’s great in the scene at the bar, and despite only having like, three lines in the scene, somehow brings the best energy of anyone in the first “classroom” scene. Does it bother me that Tom Cruise (one of my favorite actors) gets upstaged by an actor that fell off the face of the Earth for almost a decade before bouncing back with ER? Not in the slightest.

I just love Goose. Granted, I have a soft spot for tall sidekicks with facial hair. I’m all-in on Goose, Jules from Pulp Fiction, Oates from Hall and Oates, Sammy Davis Jr, and my favorite, Luigi. But Goose maintains a special place in my heart. I own a Top Gun flightsuit with a nameplate that says “Goose” and on multiple occasions I have grown out a mustache to be Goose for Halloween, regardless of whether or not anyone is going as Maverick. As far as I’m concerned, Goose is the hero of the movie. So as soon as he’s not around anymore, I kind of lose interest. I just don’t really care anymore once I can’t watch Goose.

There is one part of Top Gun that has driven me absolutely bananas for the last 20 years. Are we really supposed to believe that Cruise and Edwards are able to play Kilmer and Rossovich to a draw in a beach volleyball match? Iceman and Slider each have at least six inches on Maverick, and Maverick is wearing jeans, for Christ’s sake. The only options here is that Goose is the greatest volleyball player in the history of the U.S. military (a viable explanation, perhaps), or the volleyball scene is the greatest suspension of disbelief that the movie asks of us, which is saying -a lot-.

I’d say that I have two favorite parts of the movie, one that’s rather stupid and one that’s actually pretty cool.

To start with — the original music is fantastic. “Take My Breath Away,” “Playing With The Boys,” and the timeless “Danger Zone” encapsulate the 1980s better than any three songs from any movie I can think of. Listen to any three of those songs and try to picture anything other than mid-1980s America. You can’t. The music fits the movie perfectly — not just the vibe of the era, but the quality of the music itself. Is Kenny Loggins a good musician? I genuinely don’t know. Do I love how bad “Playing With The Boys” and “Danger Zone” are, or do I just love them with no irony whatsoever? Again, I really, truly don’t know. I wish I did, but I don’t.

The other part of Top Gun that I love is that there are seemingly no special effects. The aerial sequences were not manufactured on a sound stage. They mounted cameras on F-14s and Learjets and flew them around and got all of the footage the hard way. They got clearance from the government to use all of the aircraft seen in the movie, and had to pay close to $10,000 per hour for fuel and other operating costs associated with “borrowing” military vehicles. They even put all of the actors into the cockpits — obviously, they weren’t flying the planes themselves, but most of the footage of people inside flying planes actually came from the inside of flying planes.

I’ve seen Top Gun 10 or 12 times, and I still can’t give you an objective answer on whether or not I think it’s a good movie or not. There are bad movies I love, and objectively great movies that I couldn’t care less about, and Top Gun lies somewhere in the middle on both spectrums. With a gun to my head, I’d probably tell you that it’s a bad movie, but for whatever reason, I think I love the bad parts (like, any scene with dialogue) just as much as I love the good parts (any scene in the air). Regardless of why I love it, I love it enough that it lands at №66 on my list.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One