Top Gun: The Best of the Best
Is there a more complete Hollywood blockbuster than Top Gun?
By MICHAEL NAZAREWYCZ
With summer movie season in full heat, I began thinking about great blockbusters that have come along since Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), the film widely regarded as the first summer blockbuster. Many titles have earned a spot on that “Best Of” list over the last four decades: Star Wars (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Jurassic Park (1993), and Titanic (1997), for example. But the one that keeps coming back to my mind as “The Best Of The Best” is Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986).
Top Gun tells the story of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise), a fighter pilot who gets the chance to compete at Top Gun — an advanced flight training program and intramural flying competition (of sorts) for the Navy’s elite pilots. The winner of the contest gets his name in the history books, a nice plaque, and choice of his next assignment.
With his Radar Intercept Officer Goose (Anthony Edwards), Maverick’s main competition is the cocky and equally talented duo of Iceman (Val Kilmer) and Slider (Rick Rossovich). But Maverick is also competing against the memory of his late father and legendary fighter pilot, Duke Mitchell.
Top Gun is not just barrel-rolls and daddy issues though. Maverick finds a love interest in Top Gun’s civilian instructor Charlotte “Charlie” Blackwood (Kelly McGillis), and he must face an unexpected tragedy near the end of the competition. When the F-14 games become the real deal as a result of Soviet MiGs wandering into hostile airspace, Maverick isn’t sure he has what it takes to be…Top Gun.
Released on May 16, 1986, Top Gun topped the box office charts for the year with $176 million, just edging out the action/comedy Crocodile Dundee. The film also spawned documentaries like The Story of Top Gun, Top Gun: The Story Behind the Story, and the History Channel’s Top Gun: The Aces — not to mention an amazing uptick in real-life Navy recruitment, which I’ll consider later.
Also, like many action-adventure films, Top Gun was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Sound, Film Editing, Sound Effects Editing, and Music (it won only in the last category for the song “Take My Breath Away”). The film won lesser-known awards for the same technical achievements as well.
Those are some of Top Gun’s official accolades. From here forward, it’s (mostly) personal.
In the history of the summer popcorn movie, pound-for-pound, I’m hard pressed to locate a more complete Hollywood blockbuster than Top Gun. It succeeds in at least seven key areas:
1. It showcases a bonafide movie star.
There’s a lot of chatter today that Hollywood is unable to produce movie stars — They’re all too old! They’re an endangered species!, They’re dead! — and, interestingly, said talk is usually followed by statements like this: Tom Cruise is one of the last great movie stars, at least in the traditional sense.
At the time of Top Gun, not only was Tom Cruise handsome, charming, and athletic, but he also had a well-balanced resumé of films — at the young age of 25 — that earned him fans of all genres:
- Romance: Endless Love (1981)
- Drama: Taps (1981)
- Literary Adaptation: The Outsiders (1983)
- Teen Sex Comedy, an ‘80s staple: Losin’ It (1983)
- Teen Sports Drama: All the Right Moves (1983)
- Fantasy: Legend (1985)
There’s one other film: the adult comedy Risky Business (1983), with its iconic scene of Cruise’s dancing in his underwear to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll” and to which he recently paid homage in his lip-sync contest with Jimmy Fallon.
This scene surely wore out pause and rewind buttons across the land (VHS, people!). But it also made Cruise big — and positioned him to go bigger. All that was missing from Cruise’s oeuvre at the time was an action film. Top Gun would fill that gap — and solidify his movie star status.
2. It caters to male and female consumption, gay and straight.
Top Gun provides core military aviation components (firepower, aerial acrobatics, dogfighting), a reckless male lead on a bad-ass motorcycle, and some fierce male competition. Then, there’s Kelly McGillis.
Rather than burdening her character, Charlie, in stereotypical big-haired ‘80s eye-candy style, much of McGillis’s onscreen appeal stems from her intellect, position of civilian authority, the respect she commands from her military counterparts, and how she holds her own in the man’s world of fighter pilots.
That said, it’s hard to deny McGillis is also physically attractive, whether in a pencil skirt, heels, and leather flight jacket, or barefoot in Maverick’s white oxford shirt.
One could argue that Top Gun also features plenty of images for straight women (and gay men) to consume — although, as a film generated and released in the middle of the Reagan era, this was likely not the creators’ intent. Good thing Stuart Hall taught us about the different ways viewers encode and decode texts!
Again, the strength of Top Gun’s female lead is presumably a draw for women, but so is (perhaps?) the abundance of objectified men who don formal Navy attire, walk about mostly naked in locker rooms, and glisten with oil during that volleyball game. You know the one.
Set to Kenny Loggins’ catchy “Playin’ With the Boys,” Top Gun’s volleyball scene serves virtually no purpose for character development or plot advancement. One could argue that the onscreen game reiterates the theme of competition, but for the most part, it’s there for titillation — however a viewer may want to interpret that.
3. It contains violence (a box-office draw), but it’s bloodless action.
Looking back on action films of the late 1970s thru the mid-1980s, we find much of the violence is gun-centric and, in many cases, excessive, e.g., Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films, Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo films, and Chuck Norris’ films. While this vein of action was popular — the 1980s was the era of the hardbody, after all — it could certainly be a viewed as a turn-off to some and numbing to others (as it is today).
The type of violence found in Top Gun is detached plane vs. plane combat (instead of man vs. man) and features faceless enemy victims who are battled and conquered in one (long) climactic action sequence, not endlessly over the course of the movie. Even Goose’s death is bloodless.
4. It’s patriotic and xenophobic, but not overtly.
Two recurring themes found in a large chunk of 1980s films are patriotism and xenophobia. Lest we forget, it was “Morning in America” during Ronald Reagan’s two-term presidency. And we were a nation of filmmakers and moviegoers using the medium to come to grips with, among other cultural events, our involvement in Vietnam and how we treated our returning veterans.
At the same time, the Cold War was red hot, which means many onscreen enemies were Soviets. Films like 1984’s Red Dawn (Colorado teens fight Soviet invaders) and 1985’s Invasion U.S.A. (a one-man army faces the potential for Soviet invaders) constantly waved the flag. They reminded audiences who the enemy was and put the notion of a domestic threat in our heads long before it actually happened on September 11, 2001.
One of the most glaring examples of this is Rocky IV (1985), which dispensed all that patriotism and xenophobia into the boxing ring. Rocky (Stallone) donned his stars-and-stripes trunks and took the fight to Ivan Drago (Dolph Lungren) in the Russian motherland.
Looking back on these films today, much of them play like updated versions of the WWII propaganda-driven fare Hollywood studios cranked out in the 1940s. But Top Gun’s commentary on Russia isn’t quite that overt.
Yes, in Top Gun the heroes are American and the enemy is Russian, but no one needs to wave a flag at the end of the movie because everyone already knows the score. Other films of the era showboat that conflict/relationship; this one acts as though it just belongs there.
Top Gun film struck such a chord with the American male that the Navy saw a spike in recruitment. I can speak to this personally as I was one of those teenage boys who left the theater and started making plans to become a naval aviator (the film was released just weeks before I graduated high school). I already owned the leather bomber jacket, and Ray Ban Aviator glasses soon followed. But being a jet jockey meant more than just style, and thanks to my poor vision, the career wasn’t meant to be.
Was this spike due to an overwhelming sense of obligation to country? Maybe. But I found “the cool factor” far more alluring. Surely I wasn’t alone?
5. It covers all storytelling styles.
We’ve already considered action and alluded to Charlie’s and Maverick’s romance here, but Top Gun engrosses viewers via comedy and tragedy as well.
The comic relief belongs almost entirely to Anthony Edwards’ character, Goose. Where most of the pilots are either “beefcake-y” or “pretty-boys,” Goose is the boy-next-door. He’s the funny one, relying on a deadpanned delivery of lines that, fortunately, don’t drown in incessant ‘80s snark or lingo.
Top Gun’s tragedy is two-fold. Part of it has to do with the death of Goose and how Maverick handles himself in the wake of that. Like Goose’s humor, Maverick’s sorrow and self-doubt are just enough; his wrestling with his own conscience never devolves into mawkish handwringing.
The other is less tragedy and more pathos, as Maverick is forced to live in the shadow of his father with whom the head of Top Gun (Tom Skerritt) flew missions in Vietnam. It doesn’t get too heavy — he’s living in a shadow, not haunted by a ghost — nor does it get too introspective. But it does offer a little more substantiation for Maverick’s recklessness than, say, movie-star looks and a “hot bod.”
6. It’s endlessly quotable.
There are too many quotes to mention here without typing the entire screenplay, but here are a few of my favorites:
- “I feel the need … the need for speed!”
- “Son, your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash.”
- “He flies by the seat of his pants — completely unpredictable.”
- “The Defense Department regrets to inform you that your sons are dead because they were stupid.”
It’s memorable dialogue like this — with lines that I have used, quite frankly, in my car (don’t judge me) — that still resonates almost 30 years later. (A more robust list of quotes can be found on IMDb.)
7. And oh…that soundtrack.
Just as the genesis of the summer blockbuster has its roots in the 1970s, so too does the rebirth of the movie soundtrack. After incredible success with the soundtracks to films like Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978), Hollywood quickly learned that interest in music from a film can generate interest in that film (and vice versa). What’s more, if one tailors a hit song to place in that film, one might just get a hit film with it.
Of the all-time Top 10 selling movie soundtracks, Top Gun comes in at #7 with 20 million copies sold. Loaded with songs from some of the biggest acts of the decade, the soundtrack is as intertwined with the film it accompanies as much as any other record/movie combination out there, e.g., The Graduate, Dirty Dancing, Flashdance. “Danger Zone” and “Take My Breath Away” were written expressly for the movie itself.
Top Gun’s soundtrack also features a trio of popular oldies: “Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay,” “Great Balls of Fire,” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin.’” These songs tapped a popular vein of 1950s and 1960s musical nostalgia that existed alongside the modern synth-driven pop of the era. (See Michael D. Dwyer’s Back to the Fifties for more on the 1980's obsession with the past.)
Countless films are better than Top Gun. But again, I’m hard pressed to find a Hollywood blockbuster that does so much at one time and with such great success. It has box-office credentials, cross-gender and orientation appeal, action, comedy, drama, pathos, memorable dialogue, an affective (and hit) soundtrack, and a movie-star lead.
Also, Top Gun is one of the films that made us (re)consider producers (like Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson) as auteurs. Finally, unlike most summer fare today, the film didn’t bank almost entirely on CGI for its box-office intake. Many of the thrills were real. (Note: Cruise is up for Top Gun II if no CGI is involved.)
If that doesn’t deserve the label Best of the Best, I don’t know what does.
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