Top Gun
Year: 1986
Rating: PG
Length: 110 minutes / 1.83 hours
Top Gun (1986) was one of those movies I actively avoided watching for years. I’ve never been too keen on the military, and this movie just screamed military propaganda to me. Sure, there were enough memes spawned from this movie (before memes were really a thing) that I felt I understood the movie well enough without having seen it. When the sequel came out this year, I figured it was probably time I give the original a chance before I went to the theater to see the summer blockbuster of 2022.
For its time, Top Gun certainly used the best special effects it could to make it seem like Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, and Anthony Edwards were actually flying these fighter jets. These effects stand up pretty well to time, but mostly because the cuts where we see the actors are so close in that you can’t even tell what’s going on around them. I’m sure if you cut out those close shots and just showed the bits with fighter jets doing all their fancy acrobatics with actor voiceovers, you’d still get the same effect.
It’s no wonder that recruitment for the Navy skyrocketed after Top Gun came out. Tony Scott expertly filmed these action sequences, showing the amazing capabilities of American fighter jets and their skilled pilots. The characters—Tom Cruise’s “Maverick” being the key role here—oozed machismo in a way that guys of this era wanted to be exactly like them. Of course, the standard 80s action film plot always had this quality to it, so it didn’t really matter what the rest of the story was about. But people don’t watch 80s action films for thought-provoking plots anyway, so at least it was entertaining.
The best-looking Navy propaganda 1986 had to offer, I give Top Gun 3.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
