Top Gun (1986): The Textbook Genre Film

Top Gun is a golden calf of the no one makes good movies anymore crowd. Even a cursory glance at this notion some calf-worshippers hold so dear will reveal it to be, well, bull, but it’s not hard to see that blockbusters of the 1980s feel different than movies made today. One may wonder what will become of media discourse in forty years when a new generation arises to take the reins of this weird notion. Top Gun is a movie that solidified the stereotype of the 80’s action flick, and while it can sometimes be frustrating in hindsight – especially since its own sequel asked the questions it was too afraid to – it’s fun enough to watch, and eventually develops into something more than its macho posing had initially suggested. About two-thirds of the way through the movie, a fateful accident involving a fighter pilot named Pete “Maverick” Mitchell occurs, and it is here that the movie becomes more than a genre exercise, and also where I began to wonder why it had settled for less before.

Fighter pilots are easy fodder for screenwriters because we've always celebrated them as bad boys flying straight into the teeth of some insurmountable opponent. During the Korean War, the kill-to-death ratio for American fighter pilots going up against their enemies was 12-to-1. In Vietnam, that ratio fell to 3-to-1. A special pilot program in the U.S. Navy known as, get this, Top Gun, exists to correct that ratio, and this movie exists to catalog the petty disputes of the pilots and their commanders. If nothing else, I got to hear a grown man storm out of his office while yelling I want some butts! Tom Cruise’s rule-bending, gravity-defying Maverick is the main character of this movie, and his aerial feats that are immortalized with cheesy, dated action movie cliches are but a backdrop to his budding romance with Charlie, a pretty civilian contractor for the Navy, because a movie like this needs a pretty civilian contractor for him to tease and sleep with.

While I understand that Top Gun: Maverick, this movie’s far superior legacy sequel, had the advantage of using its predecessor's shortcomings as a launching point, it’s hard not to compare the two. Top Gun is a genre film, while Maverick gradually revealed itself to be so much more. The original is never terrible, but it’s also never great, and it’s a staple of comfort food cinema that left me wanting more than a comfortable rub on the back. Imagine a group of fifty-year-old men sitting in the living room, sipping beer and talking about how they don’t make movies like they used to. This is the movie they would be talking about. It’s a hyper-masculine thrill ride that doesn’t demand a lot of you, full of smack-talking pilots, beautiful women who frequent bars, and silly, grin-evoking representations of the baser instincts of men.

Being about fighter jets, you can expect to see a lot of airplane action in this movie. Early on, Maverick and his flying buddy, Goose, intercept an aircraft encroaching on American airspace. After they scare the bogey off, Maverick turns his plane upside-down, flies over top of the offending pilot, flips him the bird, and then peels off. A silly stunt like this is only a precursor to the real action over a far-away ocean, where Maverick and a cocky pilot with the codename of Iceman are going to have to put aside their rivalry for the sake of survival. Of course, this movie's flying scenes are nothing compared to its sequel, because why would they be, but they still feel realer and heavier than other practical effects of the 1980s, courtesy of the production crew using real fighter jets, thank God. These practical effects are at their best when the camera is actually attached to the chassis of a fighter jet. Yes, you heard me. That wasn’t a common practice back then, nor, come to think of it, is it really now.

Top Gun wants to be most interesting when it’s on the ground, and sometimes it is. Maverick and Charlie’s romance is fairly standard stuff, and every time they lock eyes, Berlin’s Take My Breath Away begins to play. I sometimes wish that I could have heard nothing but silence for a change. The great evener is that Maverick and Goose’s relationship as pilots is easily the movie’s most consistently impressive element, a remarkably human balancing act that sometimes makes all the hammier aspects of the movie feel natural when you consider that a lot of men do actually talk to each other like this out of a goofy sense of camaraderie, even if the rest of the characters fall prey to the typecasting that was so common at the time. Their brotherhood is what helps this movie fly when its worship of genre threatens to ground it. Their friendship is what most people remember about the movie, and rightfully so, if only because they cast a long shadow over everything else in it.

I understand that watching movies is an emotional experience for people, but it’s movies like Top Gun that make me glad that many in Hollywood realized they should be more, even if the bureaucracy of the industry sometimes quashes the good intentions of their artists. This movie is a relic – a calf – of days gone by, the good and the bad of it. Rarely more, and nothing less. There is a satisfaction to be had in watching men drink beer, fly fighter planes, and frequent bars in hopes of wooing the local women. Maybe it’s my fault for wanting more.

Top Gun – 7/10

Ecclesiastes 11:7-10