The dogfights and aerial footage are fun, but a person might best forget the love story and melodrama.
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"I feel the need...the need for speed!"
--Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards, "Top Gun"
Note: In the following joint review, both John and Hock wrote up their comments on the movie, with John also writing up the Video, Audio, Extras, and Parting Shots.
The Film According to John:
You don't watch "Top Gun" for its plot or its characters or its high moral value. You watch it for its spectacular dogfighting scenes, its aerial combat, and its thrills. Which is what makes those parts of the movie more enjoyable in high-definition picture and sound. In fact, the folks at Paramount were so confident that the movie would totally engross viewers with its improved HD audio and video on their earlier HD DVD release, they figured you wouldn't notice that there were no bonus items on the disc. Well, apparently some people did notice, and on this Special Collector's Edition Blu-ray disc with its additional space, they provide the host of extra materials they included in their last standard-def two-disc edition.
The movie, released in 1986 from director Tony Scott ("Days of Thunder," "Crimson Tide") and co-producer Jerry Bruckheimer ("Armageddon," "Pearl Harbor"), was an immediate success. Tom Cruise, then early in his career, reached the peak of his game with "Top Gun," and he's been a superstar ever since. The movie itself is little more than a high-flying video game (or music video, take your pick) plotted out with schmaltzy romantics, smug characters, and corny melodramatics, but for the purposes of our discussion--Blu-ray--it does exactly what action fans (and high-definition fans) want. It delivers mostly sharp images and rock-solid, room-shattering sound. Play it through once to remind yourself how bad much of the film is, and from then on go back from time to time and play selected dogfight scenes for your friends and neighbors to wow and drool over. It's that kind of flick.
The movie's preface states that "On March 3, 1969, the United States Navy established an elite school for the top one percent of its pilots. Its purpose was to teach the lost art of aerial combat and to ensure that the handful of men who graduated were the best fighter pilots in the world. They succeeded. Today, the Navy calls it Fighter Weapon School. The flyers call it Top Gun."
The film knows where it's going and what it's about by starting with a rousing flight encounter. If the movie had stuck with this kind of thing, it would have been more fun. Instead, the story centers on a stereotypical young pilot, Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, played by Cruise, who is so cocky and so egotistical we just want to smack him. He's reckless and unpredictable, endangering the lives of everybody around him. But, naturally, he's the best, most instinctive pilot who's ever flown a plane, so the Navy and, apparently, most audiences love him. Worse, the story equally stereotypes the people around Mitchell, from the hard-ass captain (James Tolkan) to the tough flight instructor (Michael Ironside) to the compassionate commander (Tom Skerritt) to the arrogant rival (Val Kilmer) to the endearing best friend (Anthony Edwards) to the best friend's mop-haired, airheaded wife (Meg Ryan in an early role before she became so famous).
Most unlikely, perhaps, is the love interest, which goes on much too long between Mitchell and a woman he meets in a bar, Charlotte "Charlie" Blackwood (Kelly McGillis), who is, believe it or not, an astrophysicist working with the pilots at the flight school. The scriptwriters throw this whole romantic angle into the plot almost haphazardly, obviously hoping it will diversify the action and then trusting to the best. There is practically no chemistry between Cruise and McGillis that I could see, and why a scientist like McGillis's Blackwood would fall for a young, conceited jerk like Cruise's Mitchell is anybody's guess, unless it's just that she thinks Cruise's character is cute. Certainly, Cruise has ample opportunity to flash his famously boyish, toothy smile around enough times.
Oh, and you'd better like 80s' music because it plays every minute in the background.
So, what we've got in "Top Gun" is a series of flying segments interspersed with a load of machismo, a lukewarm romance, a tepid rivalry, a dash of tragedy (can't forget the pathos), and a final combat sequence. Fortunately, when the story does come down to that last aerial assault, it tends to make up for a lot of the tedium that came before. Although this action climax is just as clichéd and predictable as everything else in the film, it does generate some serious excitement, especially, as I've said, in high-def picture and sound.
John's rating of the movie: 6/10
The Film According to Hock:
Remember that one girl (or boy) that you might have dated years ago? You know, there was always one that was kind of weird and you dated for a while but it never went anywhere? That person might not have been perfect but at least he or she paid you some attention. Now, many years later, you find out that he or she has been arrested for a felony or something similar. As you sit down and thank your lucky stars you broke off the relationship back then, I'm sure there are times when you must have thought, what the heck was I thinking? For me, "Top Gun" epitomizes that exact feeling and that is, what the heck what I thinking when I worshipped this movie back in 1986?
It's amazing what years of wisdom (and being continually blasted with umpteen amounts of mediocre films coming out of Hollywood) can do to one's taste in movies. Forgive me, but hey, I didn't know better then! I was a starry-eyed teen dreaming about "the need for speed" and about being as cool as Tom Cruise. That, however, lasted until the first time I boarded a commercial airplane and barfed my lungs out. Okay....my own system's imbalance precluded me from trying out for the Air Force, but I had a dream once. And in that dream, I could imagine blue skies and wispy clouds zooming past my cockpit window as I zipped along the blue yonder at Mach 1. I'm sure "Top Gun" inspired many a teenage boy back in the 80s. Who in their hormone-induced minds would not want to aspire to be a fighter pilot--a sexy jock with a control stick between their legs that carries with it enough firepower to level half a major city? Judging by the movie's half a billion-dollar box-office business worldwide, there were very few.
It never ceases to astound me that films with more glamour than substance can do so well, given the right conditions, and "Top Gun" is the perfect example. Taking the cue from a magazine article about the U.S. Navy's Top Gun advanced fighter pilot school in Miramar, California, producer Jerry Bruckheimer hit upon the idea of making a movie about this unique breed of fighter pilots. The first thing they had to do to get this project off the ground was to obtain permission from the Navy for them to shoot on location at an aircraft carrier (in this case, the U.S.S. Enterprise) and also to use actual F-14s and real Top Gun pilots to carry out some of the show's amazing aerial stunts. Jack Epps, Jr. and Jim Cash, whose other writing credits include "Turner and Hootch" and "Anaconda," were commissioned to write the screenplay, and their completed work was first unceremoniously dropped by Paramount, which was at that time helmed by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner. Fortunately for Bruckheimer, after both men left Paramount for Disney, the new management team at Paramount picked up the script again and gave the green light for "Top Gun" to start production. That decision helped produce a moneymaking machine that heralded an era of films with little substance but plenty of what many would like to call, the "wow" factor.
After suffering low-kill ratios during the Vietnam War, the U.S. Navy established the Fighter Weapons School, better known as Top Gun, at the Miramar Naval Air Station to train a nucleus of fighter crews on the skills of Air Combat Maneuvering (ACM) or dogfighting. The crews who attend Top Gun are expected to go back to their squads and impart their knowledge to their fellow pilots. Many of them even come back to Top Gun as instructors. This elite school for fighter pilots becomes the setting for this movie. Initially, after being approached by producers Bruckheimer and Don Simpson about directing "Top Gun," director Tony Scott (brother of the better-known Ridley Scott) first envisioned a dark movie in the same vein as "Apocalypse Now." Of course, the producers quickly squelched that idea and impressed upon Scott that they wanted a summer popcorn flick. And for better or worse, a popcorn flick was what the masses got. Bruckheimer has shown over the years that he is a master when it comes to producing summer blockbusters with a safe formula that almost guarantees success. "Top Gun" came in the early part of Bruckheimer's career and together with "Beverly Hills Cop" only two years earlier in 1984, established a successful formula that he has followed religiously ever since.
"That SOB cut me off!" --Tom Cruise
Lt. Pete Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is a skilled but brash and sometimes even reckless Navy fighter pilot. Mitchell's call sign, "Maverick," alludes to his rebellious attitude. Together with his more sensible radio intercept officer (RIO), Lt. Nick "Goose" Bradshaw (an unlikely Anthony Edwards), by his side (in this case, behind him) Maverick flies the Navy's potent strike fighter, the F-14 Tomcat. After an incident involving another flight crew on the aircraft carrier they're serving on, Maverick and Goose are elevated to the top slot and are ordered to go to Miramar to attend Top Gun. Once there, Maverick finds that his reputation precedes him and he predictably goes head-to-head with another calculated pilot called Iceman (Val Kilmer), who becomes sort of Maverick's nemesis in competing for the title of "Top Gun" that is given to the best pilot of each class. It is here that the movie took some liberties with what is the reality at Top Gun. First of all, there is no real competition or any trophy to win. The movie only created this fictional scenario to inject conflict between the main characters. The guys at the Navy were, shall we say, bemused by this but in no way tried to block it.
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[release]21501[/release]