Top Gun (1986)
 If you survive the noise, the moronic script, the ego-trip
smirking of the actors, and the nauseating sound track, you might
just live long enough to discover that beneath the gloss and the
beat and the posing for pinups, Top Gun has only one
message - A bunch of illiterate kids are flying the US
government's $36 million defence planes, and they're doing it all
to rock and roll.
Top Gun is nothing more than a lot of music videos
strung together aimlessly as an expensive excuse to produce a hit
album. Oh, sure. There's a lukewarm attempt to tell a cliché
riddled story swimming around among the jet blasts and the
synthesizers.
"Top Gun" is the nickname of the fighter-weapons
school in San Diego, established by the US Navy to train the top
1% of its fighter pilots.
The guys have names like Cougar, Maverick, and Goose. You've
met them all before, in countless fly-boy movies that are far
superior to Top Gun.
Tom Cruise is Maverick - A super-cool pilot with so much nerve
he can guide another frightened pilot onto the aircraft carrier
just by talking. Maverick is a wild card, unpredictable, flying
"by the seat of his pants."
"I feel the need, the need for speed!" cries
Maverick. Maverick is very stupid . . .
At Top Gun school, the fliers are thrust into competition for
the big trophy. Maverick breaks the rules, poses risks for the
other fliers, and arrogantly seduces his flight instructor,
(played by Kelly McGillis).
Naturally, everybody hates him, except the drooling teenage
girls in the audience, who don't know an F-14 from a Colt .45 . .
. and don't much care, as long as Tom Cruise keeps taking his
clothes off.
 That's
about it. The rest of the film consists of a series of competitive
flying sequences with an assortment of pretty boys in the cockpit
who look like models for Calvin Klein underwear, facing different
dangerous challenges each time out of the hangar.
When they aren't blazing through the sky in their F-14s to
eardrum-splattering Dolby stereo, they're visiting the base disco
to eardrum-splattering Dolby stereo. There are endless lectures on
negative-G pushovers and weight ratios, and a great deal of French
kissing.
Finally, the moment of truth . . . When his best friend dies in
a mechanical failure, Maverick feels responsible and loses his
self-confidence. Will Maverick throw in the gym towel, or go for
it?
There's never any suspense about which option he'll choose. The
dumb script, by Jim Cash and Jack Epps, telegraphs every emotion
and every event before they happen. There's nothing for the
audience to do but sit back and fight off the headaches.
Top Gun is a subject (and a film) of limited interest
and practically no appeal to anyone over fourteen, except
collectors of Tom Cruise beefcake calendar centrefolds and
gullible teenage boys flocking to San Diego to enlist in flying
school, praying their instructor from the Pentagon will look like
Kelly McGillis.
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