I’m fascinated by the sweat in Top Gun. Everybody in this movie is always sweatin’ buckets. The pilots in the cockpits. Everyone in the debriefing room. Everyone in the nerve center room where radar screens glow and James Tolkan barks orders to the pilots in red and blue Suspiria lighting. Even in the office scenes, the whole cast is dripping. Unseen on camera must be wet floor signs everywhere. Piso mojado!
You know how in 80s movies the streets at night are always rain-slicked? This movie does the same thing, but with the cast. Everyone, except for Kelly McGillis because leading ladies in the 80s don’t sweat, gets a mandatory five squirts from a spray bottle in the face before each take.
It gives the movie a steamy, summer-y atmosphere. It also tells us that these people work difficult, tension-filled jobs. Even the Navy’s practice manuevers are dangerous and sometimes somebody dies. Meanwhile, the competition for status is fierce. There are no shortage of hot shots. They’re not even patriots exactly. “Serving your country” never comes up here. It’s all about testosterone and the drive to be THE BEST at a glamorous job.
The pilots here are boys, really. The Navy comes off like high school, but with higher stakes. It’s depicted as a place to go if you want a cool job, but you also don’t want to grow up. Everyone’s a smartass cut-up, even at the elite level. These guys often even sit in classrooms.
Tony Scott’s direction is Slick City and always moving. His signature is lots of quick cuts and close-ups. Even quiet scenes are kinetic. Scott keeps the engine running for even the shortest of attention spans and also establishes a rhythm that carries it through its action scenes, which are all aerial dogfights. Shots of fighter jets and cuts to the intense (and, again, endlessly sweaty) faces of the pilots. Music by the likes of Harold Faltermeyer and Giorgio Moroder blares.
That stuff could easily be dull, but Scott fires it out of a machine gun. It’s fast and loud and makes for the kind of entertaining crap that resulted in the biggest hit of its year.
Still, I can’t call this a good movie. It’s a McDonald’s cheeseburger of a film. A glamour magazine cover of a film. A shallow fantasy for dumbfucks. It’s characters are complicated in the most simple ways.
Where it has value today is that it’s an essential artifact of its time. What’s the most 80s movie of the 80s? I’m not sure, but Top Gun belongs on the shortlist. It made Tom Cruise. It made the second half of the 80s. It made Navy recruitment numbers soar.
It’s more kitsch than classic, a monster hit that’s aged into something that people laugh about now. That’s what happens when your main cast takes a break to play shirtless volleyball to a Kenny Loggins song.
That was perfectly cool in 1986, though. It was a year in which you put on your pastel-colored pants, teased your mullet and then went to the shoebox theater at the mall to watch a bunch of sweaty beefcakes handle giant phallic hunks of government metal.
And you not only liked it, you also thought “I bet I could do that!”.