And then he goes to Kelly McGillis’ house and eventually they kiss all tongue-y and have silhouette sex in front of billowing curtains, and then Anthony Edwards dies in a door accident and Tom Cruise loses the will to fly and Val Kilmer wins Best New Airplane Guy and then Tom Cruise has to come back and they get the Russian MiG on target lock and they shoot it down and everyone is happy and then later that summer the Church of Scientology is like “Hey, Tom Cruise, are you free for brunch,” and now here we are. He puts on a pristine white t-shirt and a bomber jacket and leaves on his motorcycle and while he’s on the road he sees a fighter jet flying right alongside him and he yells at it excitedly because even then Tom Cruise was someone who felt like he could help planes stay in the air by yelling excitedly at them. So anyway, Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards win, and the other guys want to keep playing, and the rest of the crowd is happy just to watch. If you were a certain kind of teenage boy in 1986, the beach volleyball scene in Top Gun spoke directly to you. “Man,” he said, “they oughta have a recruitment table outside the theater.” “They really should,” I said, knowing down deep we were talking about very different recruitment tables. I speak, of course, of the beach volleyball scene, a one minute and forty second sequence in which a shirtless Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, and Rick Rossovich (plus a wisely shirtful Anthony Edwards) face off in a high-stakes pickup game to the sound of Kenny Loggins’ “Playing With The Boys.” My brother, ten years older, married with four kids now, took me to see Top Gun in the summer of 1986. Some of us witnessed a moment that stayed in our hearts forever.
A few of us walked into that multiplex and found ourselves excited in ways our peers may not have been. It was a big, sweaty phenomenon.īut Top Gun holds an entirely separate place in some of our hearts. Top Gun blew all the hell up in the summer of '86 for a variety of reasons: the Reagan-era jingoism, Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone,” the absolute incandescence of a young Tom Cruise.
The original Top Gun is about a bunch of people who know how to fly very sophisticated fighter jets but have not yet determined that they can wipe sweat off their own faces with even ordinary paper towels.
This weekend sees the release of Top Gun: Maverick, the long-awaited follow-up to the 1986 blockbuster, and while the movie did not necessarily need (the need for speed!) a sequel, I am ready.