Top Gun: Special Collector's Edition

Top Gun is rubbish. There, I've said it and I've got it out of the way. It's a film with clichéd, archetype characters, a predictable storyline and is packed to the gills with corny moments and clichéd dialogue. It's a movie about boys with toys and how one egotist must learn to rein in his raging sense of self-importance following a tragedy for which he holds himself responsible.

All that being said, it is a lot of fun and I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it.

When I was at school, kids in the playground would say things like "I feel the need... the need for speed" and, because I hadn't seen the film, I didn't know where the line came from but thought it sounded good anyway. As I grew up and watched more films, I saw Top Gun and instantly liked it. I doubt it was the soundtrack, though that was good, it was properly nothing to do with the actors, although Kelly McGillis undoubtedly played a part, but had everything to do with the hardware. At the time, I spent a lot of my leisure hours making Airfix models and, though they were mostly aeroplanes from the Second World War, there was something about the F-14A with its sweep wings that made the model so much more interesting than a Hawker Hurricane or Focke-Wulf Fw 190.

This isn't really an aside, as the film is all about the planes. As the production crew were given unprecedented access to the U.S. Navy's F-14A Tomcats, only having to pay for the fuel, the movie was basically a long, blockbusting and entertaining recruitment video for US Navy pilots. It clearly worked as, following the film's release in 1986, the number of men wanting to be U.S. Navy aviators apparently went up 500%!

Inspired by the article 'Top Guns' in California Magazine, the movie follows Lt Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell who, with his Radar Interceptor Officer Lt Nick 'Goose' Bradshaw, is selected to train with the elite, the best of the best, at the Navy's Fighter Weapons School at Miramar near San Diego. Maverick clearly considers himself the best pilot in the world and was chosen after putting both himself, his 'backseater' and, almost more importantly, the aeroplane he was piloting at risk by successfully talking a fellow pilot, who was panicking, through a successful landing on the USS Enterprise from where they were flying missions to intercept enemy MIGs.


Once at Miramar, Maverick takes an instant shine to a woman he sees in a bar and, through a little bit of duplicity, wins a bet with Goose that involves a woman on the base and sexual congress. Unbeknownst to him, the woman, Charlie Blackwood, is a civilian instructor at Miramar with a Ph.D. in astrophysics. Not wanting to appear intimidated by her, he questions her knowledge of the MIG by saying how it can indeed perform a manoeuvre she says it can't. How does he know this? Well, he was flying directly next to the MIG, but inverted and giving the pilot 'the finger' at the time.

With his eyes on the Top Gun Trophy, an award given to the best pilot to graduate, Maverick pushes the rules to the limit and, in his first flight, is so desperate to defeat 'Jester', one of the instructors, that he breaks a couple of rules, most notably the 'ceiling', by flying too low after his prey. In another training mission, he is again so desperate to defeat the instructor, this time 'Viper', that he abandons his wingman and puts himself in a position where, in his pursuit of Viper, he is easy prey for Jester and is told, in no uncertain terms, about the importance of teamwork.


At this point, the rivalry between Maverick and Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky is running white hot and a training mission ends in tragedy when Maverick follows iceman too closely, causing his F-14A to lose power in both engines and enter a flat spin. Although a Navy board of enquiry clears Maverick of any wrongdoing, he holds himself responsible and loses that competitive edge that got him to Miramar in the first place. Although he is desperate to live up to his father's reputation as a great pilot -- he never really knew him as he died in Korea when Maverick was young -- he seeks solace in Viper, who reveals he flew with Maverick's father, and decides to give it one more go.

Although it didn't seem like it at the time, Top Gun has all the hallmarks of a Jerry Bruckheimer film (he was not the big movie mogul that he is today) and more or less rescued Tony Scott's career from the desperate straits it found itself when his 1983 vampire film The Hunger (in my opinion a much maligned film that is generally overlooked and would have benefited from Scott's intended ending, rather than one that was forced upon him by the studio) fared extremely badly. It is a movie with lots of action, fast cutting, musical interludes over montage sequences and the military features extremely heavily.


Despite all its flaws, Top Gun is a film that has lasted extremely well. Some films have longevity because they don't date whereas Top Gun works because it is so unmistakably 1980s with the soundtrack dominated by Kenny Loggins, Loverboy and Berlin, the casual wear and Kelly McGillis' big, backcombed perm. It is a movie where the amount of cheese is so great it has almost been tipped straight from a fondue and you find yourself laughing at it, as well as with it as it is so ridiculously overblown.

Is Top Gun a great movie? No, but it is easy to see why it was so immensely popular at the box office, breaking records for the amount of money it raked in both at theatres and on the home video market. It is a genuinely feel-good film, a rip-roaring action movie and it is no wonder that Tom Cruise became a megastar on the back of this.

The Disc

Extra Features
The commentary has been pieced together from different interviews and footage of people watching the film with contributions from Tony Scott, Jerry Bruckheimer, Jack Epps, Jr and a couple of the experts who were advisors. Although they clearly weren't all in the same room together at the same time, it has been edited extremely well so that it fits together and you get the right people speaking at the right time.

As far as Making Ofs go, Danger Zone: the Making of Top Gun, is right up there with the very best -- and that includes the ones on the Lord of the Rings DVDs. In six parts, it goes through just about every aspect of how the film was made, from pre-production to reception. You have contributions from just about everyone who matters including those who contributed to the commentary as well as actors Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer. They go through everything in detail, especially the level of planning that went into staging the fight sequences, which used models as well as real aeroplanes. If, at the end of this two hour piece, you feel as if you need to know something else about Top Gun, then you really have a problem!


There are a selection of multi-angle storyboards with optional commentary by Tony Scott which are quite interesting as Tony Scott is a director who storyboards a great deal and he is always worth listening to even if it's not quite as interesting as his brother. (It's amazing how alike they sound, even down to slight inflections and slight mannerisms, such as adding '... yeah?' at the end of a sentence.

Although this is possibly now out of date, Best of the Best: Inside The Real Top Gun is a fascinating half-hour documentary about the real Navy Weapons Fighter School and how it had moved on from its base at Miramar using F-14s to a base in Nevada using F-18s.

If this weren't enough, there is a brief behind the scenes featurette, TV spots, a featurette on Survival Training (should it ever come in handy!) some music videos (come on, you know which ones) and a selection of interviews with Tom Cruise.


The Picture
I was extremely impressed with how Top Gun looked as, for a film now nearly 25 years old, the picture quality stands up favourably against movies made more recently. There is a slight amount of graining and other signs that the film has aged, but overall it is extremely good and it helps that the filmmakers didn't use a lot of CGI as that would have aged the film dreadfully.

Using a great deal of model work to complement the hours of real fight footage, the film is extremely well edited to give the flight sequences a real tempo and sense of energy. This is when the movie comes alive as there are some character-based bits that just don't work, but the characters are almost secondary to the scenes with the fighter planes.


The Sound
Spearheading the audio options is a spectacularly bombastic DTS-HD Master Audio 6.1 track which really involves you in the action and beautifully complements the visuals to keep the adrenaline high when it needs to be before moving into the more romantic or 'boys relaxing' scenes, in particular the infamous volleyball scene which has now entered popular culture as one of the most homoerotic scenes ever shot for a mainstream movie.

The soundtrack is pure 1980s with the Oscar-winning song Take My Breath Away by Berlin and Kenny Loggins' fantastically masculine Danger Zone but the music is all beautifully mixed and the score is none too shabby either.


Final Thoughts
Top Gun is complete tosh, but it's enjoyable tosh. When it's good, it really has you glued to the screen and is completely involved in the action, particularly during the flight sequences which are beautifully edited, but when it is cheesy and predictable, it's extremely cheesy and predictable! It comes on a remarkably good BD which puts many recent releases to shame, boasting a tremendous DTS-HD Master Audio 6.1 track and extremely crisp visuals. There are hours of extra features that tell you everything you need to know about Top Gun, and more besides. If you have fond memories of this either from watching it in the cinema or, even if you own the DVD, then this disc comes highly recommended.