Watched: Top Gun (1986).
Here’s a thing: I strongly, actively disliked this film! It was repugnant, from the borderline-MRA tactics that Tom Cruise’s character employs, to the unbelievability of the central romance, to the fact that it’s a 117-minute commercial for the US military. And honestly, the fact that it was all of these things wasn’t exactly the issue.
The problem I had is that it masquerades as something quite different - as the story of a plucky young upstart who learns some hard life lessons while still getting the girl and coming out on top. There are inspirational montages. There’s a sex scene set to “Take My Breath Away” where Tom Cruise awkwardly sucks on his girlfriend’s lip. There is some absolutely stunning camerawork with the fighter jets, including an incredible sequence where they strap a camera under one of the wings as the plane takes off. Everything is yelling yeah! Exciting! Good times!
The bit that threw me the most was the penultimate sequence, where Tom Cruise’s character rescues his arch-rival Val Kilmer by blowing five other planes out of the sky. He comes back and is essentially given a victory parade through the aircraft carrier, complete with rising musical cues, a hug, cheers and whoops. No-one remarks for a second that five men have just died. The idea of the somber execution of one’s duty is a thing that should be taken seriously is thrown out of the window. No-one gives a shit.
Even that perspective could be lent some credence were it not for the fact that the enemy aircraft in this film are left - one assumes deliberately - without a country or party of origin, instead falling under the general umbrella of “the enemy”. A phrase like that might have held muster in the first half of the 20th century, and maybe even when Top Gun was made - after all, the Cold War was only beginning to de-escalate - but now it seems incredibly sketchy, given that “the enemy” has become a worryingly fluid term.
So, um, yes. Top Gun is a garbage film. Tom Cruise gets the girl by actively harassing her in a bar, then kills a bunch of people while making jokes about it, lacking any self-awareness or irony. I have no idea why this film ended up driving up recruitment for the Navy by 500%. Sexism, I guess?