#8 in my ranking of Tony Scott’s filmography.
Gosh, I wish I liked this more than I do. I mean, it’s technically accomplished, there are some nice performances, it looks good, but the story is just so wane, the stakes so completely absent for so much of the running time, and the romance so generically dull that it seriously limits my enjoyment of what the film does well. It’s just one of those films where the technical side of things is so high that it really does just come down to a balance between that and everything else that is just kind of…boring.
Pete Mitchell, Maverick, (Tom Cruise) is a hotshot naval aviator flying F-14s with his radar intercept officer, Nick, Goose, getting sent to Top Gun, the naval school for elite aviators to teach them dogfighting. The one piece of screenwriting that I actually appreciate in this film is how the beginning, where we watch the best aviator on the aircraft carrier, Cougar (John Stockwell), get so spooked by an encounter with potential enemy MiGs that he just outright quits. This gets repeated later in the film with Maverick which is the one bit of screenwriting structure that feels like it has some real thought in it. Because, otherwise, this is just Pete up against Tom Kazansky, Iceman, (Val Kilmer) about who’s the best pilot at Top Gun.
When I say that there are no real stakes here, I really mean it. There’s little sense that what they’re doing is actually dangerous to them personally because none of the pilots are self-reflective enough to realize that they’re doing incredibly dangerous things that can end their lives for roughly the first hour and twenty minutes of the film. Aside from the opening with Cougar, it’s just a bunch of hotheads arguing about who’s the best of the best. If it weren’t matched with some incredible aerial footage of these aircraft dodging around each other, expertly edited together, it’d be a slog of boring machismo without any stakes.
And then there’s the romance. Pete meets the civilian contractor, Charlotte (Kelly McGillis), and the two have this will they won’t they relationship that’s just honestly never that interesting. It’s rote, at best, all the while we know that they’ll get together in the end, that Pete’s recklessness will temper just enough so that Charlotte can love him…except we don’t even need to get that far. They’ fall in love by the halfway point. I suppose it’s a small mercy that she isn’t one of those, “I’m always worried about losing you every time you go up,” movie wives, but they’ve replaced that trope with almost nothing instead. It’s just a dull as dishwater romance that eats up minutes and minutes of screentime.
Things get amplified during one of the training exercises when something terrible happens to a character, shaking Maverick’s confidence to the point that he thinks of quitting the whole thing. Finally, there are stakes. This honestly would have worked better if the sense of danger were more palpable through the whole preceding couple of acts instead of just relying heavily on how awesome it is to fly fighter jets (which, admittedly, seems pretty awesome). And then it really becomes, can Maverick get over the fact that he’s not really responsible for a tragedy and fly again? It’s kind of an odd moment.
And the final act is actually, finally, a clearly defined dramatic situation where tensions are running high with some unnamed foreign power in the Indian Ocean, and there’s going to be potential for violence during a rescue mission. Combine that with Maverick still trying to get over his mental blocks, and you’ve got the makings of a quality third act. It almost feels like an accident that it gets to that, to a third act that actually does kind of work, but there it is.
Also, the whole final moment with Iceman feels so unearned because the rivalry between the two was never that deep, just simplistic rivalry type stuff.
So…I’m mixed on the whole thing. The technical side of things is top notch. The third act works quite well while combining nicely with the prologue. However, everything in between is thin and dull, especially the romance. It’s a rewrite away from giving the majority of the film stakes, diminishing the romance appropriately, and tying up the whole film with a stronger emotional throughline. Maybe a decades-later legacy sequel could do…all of those things?
Originally published here
English (US) · 