Thirty years after its first release, Neil Calloway takes a look at Top Gun…
Thirty years ago this week – 16th May 1986, to be precise, Top Gun was released and pop culture was changed forever. With the possible exclusion of films where Spielberg and Lucas were involved, it is arguably the most iconic film of the 1980s, certainly if you only consider films aimed at men.
If nothing else, it turned Tony Scott into a major Hollywood player and put Tom Cruise at the top of the firmament where – couch jumping incidents aside, he has remained ever since. It gave an early role to Meg Ryan three years before When Harry Met Sally, Tim Robbins and Anthony Edwards appear eight years before The Shawshank Redemption and E.R. made them stars. Adrian Pasdar has a tiny role a full twenty years before Heroes. Add Val Kilmer (five years before The Doors), and solid stalwarts like Tom Skerritt and Michael Ironside, and it’s a hell of a cast that would be impossible to assemble today.
Having said that, it’s not the cast who are the real stars of Top Gun though, but the F-14s, and surely part of the film’s success is that much of it is shot using the real jets, rather than CGI. If it’s not the real thing then you get excellent models – future Mythbuster Jamie Hyneman worked uncredited on the models for the film. When you see the dogfights, you’re seeing the actual jets, rather than 3D rendered models that don’t age well. Other films haven’t had the access to the U.S. Military that Top Gun did, and it shows; now any movie that uses retired British jets (as spoof Hot Shots! did) looks inauthentic now.
The real credit shouldn’t go to the U.S. Navy’s hardware though. The people responsible for Top Gun‘s success aren’t Cruise or Kilmer or Scott, or the writers (Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jnr get the on-screen credit, but at least two other writers – Chip Proser and Warren Skaaren produced drafts) its super producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. They put everything together; they got the U.S. Navy involved to ensure some level of verisimilitude, they entrusted Scott -whose only other film had been The Hunger, an esoteric vampire movie starring David Bowie and Susan Sarandon. (they probably chose Scott for his work on a Saab commercial that fetishised Ray Bans, jets and cars in exactly the same way as Top Gun would). They got the cast together, grabbing unknowns with potential and solid supporting actors. It was Bruckheimer and Simpson who saw a magazine article called “Top Guns” and knew that a movie about the Navy’s Fighter Weapons School in Miramar could be a success.
Despite the spoofing – from Hot Shots! to Quentin Tarantino’s cameo in Sleep With Me, where he pokes fun at the supposed homoerotic subtext, the movie still stands up – a version that had been converted to 3D was shown in 300 IMAX cinemas in the US for two weeks in 2013 and made $3 million. It helped create the military action film that Bruckheimer is still making a success today.
Comparing the film to recent, similar movies shows how well it stands up; not many films would now feature a (slightly) older woman as a love interest, the main cast are at least ten years older than you’d get for a summer blockbuster nowadays, technical jargon goes unexplained; it doesn’t talk down to the audience, dialogue is a little sharper.
After its release, sales of Ray Bans went through the roof, enlistment in the U.S. Navy increased, Tom Cruise became a star, Bruckheimer and Simpson became giants of Hollywood, but perhaps the most successful person involved in the film was Scott Altman, who at the time was one of the F-14 pilots who did some of the flying in the film, he went on to join NASA and flew on four space shuttle missions.
Top Gun is not perfect, but it remains one of the great popcorn movies and as yet, hasn’t been sullied by a below par sequel. It’s funny, it’s got action, it’s got romance, it’s got some cool jets, cars, bikes and aircraft carriers. What’s not to like? Get your Ray Bans on and watch the blu-ray soon. You won’t be disappointed.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future instalments.
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Originally published May 15, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
