Top Gun: Special Collector's Edition

Taking off with the fly boys of summer.

Cinematic entertainment can be roughly divided into two sub-categories: films and movies. Films typically possess a certain gravitas, a weight and seriousness of purpose in their storytelling. Movies, on the other hand, are simply intended to entertain and divert the viewer and provide an escape from their regular lives. (e.g. Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas is a film; Nicolas Cage in Con Air is a movie.) Uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer makes movies, and a good case study of his winning formula can be found on the new Top Gun: Special Collector's Edition DVD.

Bruckheimer and his now-deceased partner Don Simpson had already scored hits with American Gigolo, Flashdance and Beverly Hills Cop and made stars of Richard Gere, Jennifer Beals and Eddie Murphy. With this movie, they turned a magazine article about the Navy's advanced air combat school in San Diego into a winning film that solidified a formula that, when viewed objectively, has done plenty of damage to the summer popcorn film ever since.

Utilizing a development process that was one part Joseph Campbell Myth 101 and three parts Chinese Menu 442 (take one Generic Hero from Column A, add two Issues from Column B, mix in some conflict from the condiments bar, stir-fry and head for the bank), Simp/Bruck cast Top Gun with choice Hollywood pretty-boy beefcake and put British director Tony Scott (brother of Ridley) at the helm. He was a controversial choice because his sole previous feature, the arty vampire flick The Hunger, had been a box office flop and his only real credential as an action director was a Saab commercial that featured the car racing a jet.

The now-familiar story of Top Gun is a model of simple efficiency. Tom Cruise is Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, a brash hotshot Navy pilot with a history of subverting his innate abilities with reckless behavior. When his squadron's #1 pilot turns in his wings after a scary encounter with a MiG from an unnamed Communist country (it's supposed to be North Korea according to the commentary), he and his jovial sidekick, Goose (Anthony Edwards), are sent to the Miramar Naval Base and its "Top Gun" school to go up against "the best of the best."

Sometimes Maverick simply forgot to verify his target.

Since fighter pilots are the rock stars of aviation with the substantial egos to match, the classrooms and locker rooms are filled with combustible levels of testosterone and attitude as the crews pursue the fictional Top Gun Trophy. The consensus pick for top dog at Top Gun is Ice Man (Val Kilmer) who pairs his flying skills with a cool discipline that allows him to wait for his opponent to make a mistake. He and Maverick repeatedly antagonize each other and it eventually leads to disaster.

To prevent this all from looking only like a handsome boys modeling school, tossed into the mix is Kelly McGillis as Charlie. Maverick crudely - I'm sure he thinks he's being charming - serenades and propositions her at the Officer's Club one night and while she's coyly interested, she demurs for a reason we discover in the next scene: Whoops! She's an instructor at Top Gun!

While Maverick and Charlie go thru the motions of a mating dance, their relationship feels tacked on and according to the commentary it was, with the elevator and love scenes shots months afterward (McGillis' hair is under a cap because she'd cut it for another role when the reshoots happened) to pump up the romance for the girls in the audience. Despite this subplot, the filmmaker's heads were in the clouds and that's where Top Gun heads - it's The Fast and the Furious at Mach 2 with Sidewinder missiles instead of NOS tanks.

Yes, that pose makes you look decisive. Now will you please get out of here?

The spectacular training and combat sequences aren't anything like real air operations, but for a generation weaned on the attack on the Death Star, it's what's expected. With the cooperation of the Navy, real F-14s and disguised F-5s (to serve as MiGs) whip, twist and dive across the screen. (It's little wonder that enlistment went up in the wake of the movie's release) Combined with seamless model work, you get a hint as to what drives these guys' "need for speed."

Back to the story - part of the Hollywood Blockbuster Formula as perfected by Simp/Bruck (and codified by screenwriting guru Syd Field) requires some major challenge to arise for Our Hero to overcome and immediately after the arrival of Goose's loving wife (Meg Ryan) and son, it's obviously time to cook Goose and shake Maverick's confidence. So foreshadowed is Goose's pending sacrifice on the Altar of the Plot Point, it was a no-brainer for the Top Gun spoof Hot Shots to have a noble character named "Dead Meat."

Of course, Maverick is able to get back in the flying saddle and save the day in the climatic air battle, but was there every any doubt? This is MOVIE, not a film and the hero always saves the day, gets the girl and flies into the sunset on his supersonic steed. If it's so predictable, why did it succeed so well?

Anthony Edwards gets a glimpse of his future medical career.

When Top Gun was produced, MTV was still a puppy and hadn't become the music-destroying beast it now is. The kinetic visual style of videos was still seeping into the cinema - notably Flashdance - and Top Gun elevated the music video style above its substance in a full embrace of its shallowness. From the hazy interiors, color-gradient filters on the lens and styling of the male cast, Scott brought a "visual rock & roll" flavor to his direction. These visual fillips are so common now it's hard to believe that the studio was initially freaked out when they got the first dailies of carrier operations filmed in slow-motion - what is now the credits sequence of the finished film.

After Top Gun, Simpson and Bruckheimer refined and recycled the lessons learned into a finely-tuned machine producing weapons of cinematic destruction, frequently re-employing Scott to helm bigger and noisier movies like Beverly Hills Cop II, Days of Thunder and Crimson Tide (which the Navy did NOT assist with) and bringing Michael Bay along to direct even bigger, more deafening and certainly dumber movies such as Bad Boys, Armageddon and the ultimate military misfire, Pearl Harbor.

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