"Top Gun": remembrance

I've just re-watched the original "Top Gun." It's been literally decades since I last saw the movie, and I have no plans to write a review. Instead, I'll offer some impressions. 

Other critics have already noted that the sequel, "Top Gun: Maverick," is a much more mature film in comparison. For me, though, with "Maverick" fresh in my mind, it was interesting to re-watch "Top Gun" and recognize the moments that get a call-back in the newer film—the "memberberries" mentioned in my review of "Maverick"—and to see how the newer film matches the story rhythm of the older film.

The first thing I noticed was the style of the opening credits: "Maverick" pays tribute to Tony Scott's movie by mimicking those credits almost exactly. This includes the slow-tempo Harold Faltermeyer intro that suddenly shifts gears into Kenny Loggins's "Danger Zone." Since I watched "Top Gun" via Amazon Prime Video, I was able to call up trivia as I was watching, and the first embarrassing thing to note is that the Navy actually refers to this aerial-combat school as TOPGUN—all one word—not TOP GUN. That may not seem like a big deal to you primates who read phonetically and don't care about language, but I spend a lot of time as a proofreader, and that's a huge deal to me. (Plus: military guys do notice when you get military stuff wrong, and Hollywood endlessly gets things wrong.)  Luckily, within the world of the movie, there are Navy personnel who wear hats that say TOPGUN, the proper designation.

There's a moment where Maverick is facing off against Jester (the always-cool Michael Ironside, a Canuck actor who inevitably ends up playing Americans), and Goose (Anthony Edwards) yells, "Do some of that pilot shit." In the newer movie, this line is echoed by Rooster (Miles Teller), son of Goose, who ends up as Maverick's back-seater inside a stolen F-14 (which Rooster disparagingly calls a "bag of ass") in the 2022 film. Several other quotes heard in "Maverick" come from the original movie as well, such as when Viper (Tom Skerritt) tells Maverick, after Goose dies, that losing someone is an inevitability, and that "there will be others"—something Maverick says to Rooster in the new film.

I'd completely forgotten that Iceman graduates as first in the class, and while I remembered that Maverick had suffered a crisis of confidence after Goose's death, I'd forgotten the extent to which he'd been shaken. While "Top Gun" feels less developed than "Maverick" in many ways, one of the things the film got right was the poetic parallel between Maverick's crisis and that of Cougar (John Stockwell), Maverick's wingman at the beginning of "Top Gun." Other things I'd forgotten: Tim Robbins is in "Top Gun," in the role of Merlin! And Clarence Gilyard, whom you might remember from "Die Hard" ("The police have themselves an RV!") and the TV series "Walker: Texas Ranger," is Maverick's back-seater for a time, call sign Sundown. We also very briefly see Adrian Pasdar; he's barely in the film, and while you might not recognize the name, I'm sure you'd recognize the face because he's been in plenty of movies and TV shows, including a boxing movie for which I have a soft spot called "Streets of Gold," which also starred Klaus Maria Brandauer and Wesley Snipes.

"Top Gun" is also pretty painfully rooted in the 80s. The poofy, flammable hairstyles; the synth music; the speed and rhythm of the editing; and the painfully corny dialogue all took me back to a different era.  I guess every movie is trapped in its own time period. "Maverick" has a lot of corny dialogue as well, and I imagine that that will age poorly, too, but for the moment, the dialogue in "Maverick" benefits from its recency.  We'll come back to the movie in thirty-some years, assuming I'm still alive and conscious enough to remember this sequel.

Having now watched some of the "DVD extras" that came with my iTunes purchase of Maverick, I know that Tom Cruise, as a producer on the new film, had a great deal of creative control. Cruise is also a pilot (that's his own P-51 Mustang in the film, and that's really him and Jennifer Connelly flying together as the credits roll), and he insisted on all the main actors' receiving flight training as a way to up the realism factor. I think that this, coupled with Joseph Kosinski's direction, helped make "Maverick" a better-paced, better-edited film (no disrespect to Tony Scott, to whom "Maverick" is dedicated). There were many moments, during the various dogfights in "Top Gun," where it was hard to follow the action, and certain missile-launch sequences looked like repeated footage. None of those flaws appear in the new film, where it's much easier to track who's doing what, and where.

All that said, re-watching "Top Gun" was a nostalgic experience. It also brought back some naughty recollections: one thing I remembered from seeing the movie as a horny teen was all the tongue action between Cruise and Kelly McGillis during their major love scene, and yup—I hadn't misremembered that. Lots of lingual sparring going on. I vaguely recall some rumors, back in the day, about how Kelly McGillis was actually a lesbian (she did, in fact, come out). That might have been titillating news back in the dinosaur era, but with everyone being trans and non-binary these days, lesbianism is boring... and I can't for the life of me figure out how I veered from nostalgia to sexuality in this paragraph. One-track mind, I guess.

Above, I mentioned story rhythm. While the new movie isn't a beat-for-beat repeat of the older movie, "Maverick" does contain some of the major beats from the first film, right down to the triumphant landing on the carrier and the Ewok-like celebratory crowd that surrounds the pilots. A few things are substantially different in the new film, though: Cruise was dangerously close to sporting a unibrow in the 1986 film, and his buck teeth were front and center back then. Both are gone now. A quick trip through Google Images shows that Cruise's teeth have changed at least twice. Pics of him when he was a young'n show what my brothers would have called "the mouth of madness" (an expression they borrowed from the title of a horror film from way back when: "Into the Mouth of Madness")—he had really bad teeth. I don't blame him for wanting to straighten that mess out (was it dentistry... or Scientology?).

While re-watching "Top Gun" was fun, I doubt I'll be watching it again. I saw it via Amazon Prime Video, which means I didn't buy the film, and I don't plan to. I think of my collection of purchased movies as a sort of personal Hall of Fame, and while "Maverick" easily makes the cut, I'm not sure that "Top Gun" does, especially with the perspective of thirty-six years. 

Instead, I'll end with a plot-related question: at the end of "Top Gun," Maverick symbolically lets go of Goose by throwing his dog tags into the sea, but in the new movie, one of the major issues is that Maverick hasn't let go of Goose, and Iceman has to remind Maverick of the same thing Viper had said in the first movie: it's time to let go. I mean, sure, I can see how one can symbolically let go of a person but still feel lingering attachment, but cinematically speaking, Maverick's inability to let Goose go seems to cheapen the throwing-away of Goose's dog tags. I hope I'm making sense here. What do you think? Does the premise of the new movie cheapen the resolution of the old movie?