See: jokes about “wingmen” in bars aviators as always-trending fashion accessories Tom Cruise’s ongoing megastardom.) Part of Top Gun’s draw is also that it is exceptionally well made. I grew up in the ’80s, so nostalgia, for me, helps explain more than a little of Top Gun’s abiding appeal.
(Paramount Pictures / Everett Collection) Maverick (Tom Cruise) takes the lead as he and his flying partner, Goose (Anthony Edwards), flout Navy rules. Top Gun takes elemental themes-parents and children, humans and nature, individual desires and communal demands-and funnels them into its hero’s journey. Applications to Annapolis soared.) The film is also, however, an epic. (The Navy, which provided equipment and training for the production and reportedly shaped some of its story lines, set up recruitment booths outside theaters showing the film. Top Gun is also, via Maverick’s relationship with his civilian flight instructor, Charlie (Kelly McGillis), a screwball-inflected romance. The story of Maverick, at once officer and outlaw, shares themes with the Western, its frontier shifted from the ground to the sky. You may not like who’s flying with you, but whose side are you on?” “The enemy’s dangerous, but right now you’re worse. “Maverick, it’s not your flying it’s your attitude,” he says. He confuses bravery, often, with recklessness.
The son of a pilot who lost his life and his reputation in the fog of war, Maverick wrestles with his inheritance. Maverick’s real enemy, Top Gun makes clear, is Maverick himself. Nor, really, are the Navy’s military foes-all we know of those faceless pilots is that they fly Soviet-made MiGs. But Iceman, crucially, is not Maverick’s adversary. Maverick’s closest rival at Top Gun is Iceman (Val Kilmer), a by-the-book pilot who answers Mav’s natural talent with tactical skill. The Navy set up recruitment booths outside theaters. When people in this world talk about “the top 1 percent,” they do so with no ambivalence. (A bit like the film that bears its name, Top Gun is both forward-looking and fusty: It is meant to train pilots for future engagements in “the lost art of aerial combat.”) At the school, Maverick and Goose compete as a two-man team, mostly via combat maneuvers against fellow trainees, to win the Top Gun trophy and the Navy-wide bragging rights that come with it. But genius is genius, and so Maverick-played by Tom Cruise-and his best friend, Goose (Anthony Edwards), get chosen to attend Top Gun, the Navy’s ultra-elite flight-training school in Miramar, California. He’ll go rogue at Mach 2, which is pretty much the worst time for someone to decide that the rules do not apply to them. T op Gun’ s story is simple enough: Lieutenant Pete Mitchell, call sign Maverick, is a hotshot Navy pilot who is as rebellious as he is talented. Top Gun, an ad with a 110-minute run time, retains its allure in part because it is selling a desire that remains, all these years later, unfulfilled: an America that proves worthy, finally, of its immense power. Advertising strips away the world and its complications until all that’s left is want.
While we wait, I rewatched the original-and promptly experienced the whiplash that comes when a dated movie feels, somehow, utterly timely. Top Gun marked its 35th anniversary this spring, and its decades-in-the-making sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, originally set to be a summer blockbuster, is now scheduled to premiere later this year. Scott’s film answered the moment by attempting to sell not a car, but a country: Love the U.S. Top Gun premiered in May 1986, when the pain of Vietnam had receded, the Cold War was on the wane, and people had embraced the hope that it was morning in America.
On the strength of it, he was hired to create another ode to high-velocity machismo, this one at feature length. The ad was the handiwork of the British director Tony Scott. The crescendo comes when the car and the plane meet on a shared runway, the jet hovering over the car, each pulsing with raw power. The soundtrack is orchestral, the effect vaguely voyeuristic. The spot makes its case by splicing slo-mo shots of a car and a plane emerging from their respective hangars. I n 1983, the Swedish aerospace and auto company Saab ran an ad with an old premise-sports cars are sexy-and a new twist: Saab’s cars, the ad suggests, are as sexy as its fighter jets. This article was published online on June 15, 2021. Illustration by Paul Spella images by Mary Evans / Ronald Grant / Everett Collection