Top Gun (1986)
Directed by Tony Scott
For Lieutenant Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell and his friend and co-pilot Nick 'Goose' Bradshaw, being accepted into an elite training school for fighter pilots is a dream come true. But a tragedy, as well as personal demons, will threaten Pete's dreams of becoming an ace pilot.
44 connections found
View:
44 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Top Gun to
An orange tabby cat named Goose (dig the Top Gun reference) is a fur-ball of feisty surprises, and surely earns a place in filmdom’s feline Hall of Fame.
It’s on Earth, around the one-third mark of the film, where Larson really takes over the role because while the Hala sequences visually recall Blade Runner and Star Trek , C-57 is a Top Gun homage.
Also, Fury falls in love with an adorable cat named Goose, who’s not only the film’s umpteenth “Top Gun” reference, but also a more fun and less tiresome riff on the Groot archetype that “Guardians of the Galaxy” has already driven into the ground.
Chaotic and darkened action blurs comprehension, Top Gun parallels are disappointingly short-lived, and it appears as if the Half Nelson directors are merely tracing Marvel templates used so many times before.
In Wonder Woman , by comparison, Diana’s gender and her upbringing are instrumental to her and to us in terms of understanding the fierce, disciplined, compassionate worldview that drives her heroism; Captain Marvel ’s Carol is a wry, rule-breaking individualist with unique skills, strong ambitions and a broken-home background - the stuff of dozens of male heroes, including some of the protagonists from films like Top Gun that exert a palpable influence over the film’s story and tone.
She will succeed, because Captain Marvel is a blistering two hours of action, comedy, awesome '90s tunes from the likes of Hole, No Doubt and The Breeders (that could do for Riotgrrl and Grunge what The Guardians of the Galaxy did for '70s pop and funk), knowing nods to the rest of the MCU (and Top Gun ), and an overpowering sense of female empowerment.
Jerry Bruckheimer’s attempt to shoehorn “Top Gun” into an earthbound jet…
…you could say “F1” uses car racing much like “Top Gun” used flying fighter planes. And much like “Top Gun”, Kosinski’s film features its own perfectly cast A-lister who brings some notable star wattage to an already brilliant movie.
Ebert writes that “the archetypal Tom Cruise Movie is Top Gun, in which the young fighter pilot, a natural, was tutored by a once-great pilot and emotionally nurtured by an older female flight instructor before testing his wings against the hot dogs of his unit, in preparation for a final showdown.”
The other element that Top Gun: Maverick had that was essential to its success was the original Top Gun, which provided legacyquel plot threads like Maverick’s relationship with his old rival Iceman, along with a genuine emotional through line.
Loosely doing for Days of Thunder what Top Gun: Maverick did for Top Gun…
Just as Tony Scott segued from the unforgettable Top Gun skies to the middling Days of Thunder racetrack, Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski transitions from Tom Cruise aerial heroics to Brad Pitt speedway action with F1.
Based on a GQ article by Sean Flynn and directed by Joseph Kosinski (TRON: Legacy, Oblivion, and the upcoming Top Gun sequel), the film’s first hour or so is more about the group getting certified to be something more than backup for other Hotshots teams.
This movie gives one high hopes for Tom Cruise’s 2019 Top Gun sequel , rumored to be directed by Only the Brave’s Joseph Kosinski.
Top Gun and Point Break , for instance, are driven by a wonderful homosociality that has garnered them classic status.
A sort of “Top Gun” for firefighters ensues as the Granite Mountain crew fights for certification, bonds with each other at barbecues and participates in myriad hazing rituals.
Director Joseph Kosinski pays homage to the late Tony Scott by opening his thirty-plus-years-in-the-making sequel Top Gun: Maverick with the exact same music cues, similarly propulsive aircraft carrier b-roll, and text-based intro (adding “and women” to “the handful of men”) as Top Gun.
One is reminded that the actor starred in a legacy sequel the same year Top Gun came out, playing the hotshot protégé in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money.
Most hold a special place in their hearts for Tony Scott’s 1986 cultural phenomenon, “Top Gun” and the way it solidified Tom Cruise as a movie star resonates today.
That appears to be the main message of Top Gun: Maverick , the legacyquel to the 1986 summer blockbuster that’s finally coming out after two years of pandemic-fueled delays.
In addition to numerous sci-fi film influences, the filmmakers appear to have sprinkled their film with nods to Tom Cruise himself, from "Top Gun" Ray Bans to the New York Yankees cap the actor frequently sports.
It calls up fleeting images from things like Star Wars , The Road Warrior , and Top Gun, but more importantly, it borrows at least half the plot from Duncan Jones's amazing, underrated Moon (2009).
So “Top Gun” has become “Wall-E.”
Considering Kosinski directed Tron: Legacy is shouldn’t be a surprise to find such detail put into these sleek, wonderfully created sets and gadgets, including an impressive flying vehicle that Cruise’s hero whisks above, around and across this post-apocalyptic world, with a dogfight sequence evoking Cruise’s Top Gun days.
"Risky Business," "Top Gun," "Days of Thunder," "Cocktail," "The Color of Money," "The Firm" — it was endless and, by the time he started to get some crow's-feet, a little unseemly.
The visual design recalls “ TRON ,” some plot elements recall “ Inception ,” the crunching action recalls “ Transformers ” and the relationships recall “ Top Gun ,” wherein a group of cocky flyboys try to one-up each other in the name of saving the world.
Oh, the human elements are there—the trauma-laced backstories, the Top Gun-flavored pilot conflict, the occasional comic relief—but it all takes second billing to the battles.
Unfortunately, the script, primarily credited to Travis Beacham and the director, also feels like it was written by a teenager who has only seen humans interact in movies like Top Gun.
Many of them seemingly swiped rather obviously from “Top Gun.” There’s Charlie Hunnam’s maverick character—he’s too unpredictable, doesn’t follow orders and “improvises”—and all the other jarhead teams are worried his incalculable nature will spell their doom.
Like Top Gun, this is an all-out recruitment PSA for the supercool machismo of combat.
Add a prolonged and unnecessary rivalry with an up-and-coming pilot (Robert Kazinsky) and the movie begins to feel like Top Gun with robots.
…an opening credit sequence—a first for a Star Wars film—that tips its hat to Top Gun…
…other modern classics (“Top Gun” to “Blade Runner,” even a little “Streets of Fire” for the real ones out there)…
…a bit of Top Gun…
Advertisement
So, too, should Tarantino’s talent for explicating genre films—for example, the suggestion he threw out several years ago that the rivalry in Top Gun between Tom Cruise’s and Val Kilmer’s characters makes that movie the story of a man fighting his homosexuality.
The film isn’t littered with Sonny Chiba, Top Gun , and Silver Surfer references, which makes sense tonally.
An aerial battle that pits Cap and Falcon against a bevy of fighter jets feels new to the MCU, especially because it veers closer to the original Top Gun than Top Gun: Maverick.
Later Onah expands his scope as the conflict heads to the very open high seas with Sam and Joaquin in full TOP GUN mode…
Transformers meets Top Gun in Peter Berg's new blockbuster Battleship , which has its origins in Hasbro's grid-based guessing game.
Based on a video game, the week's expensive blockbuster – the long, loud, ludicrous, mindlessly enjoyable Battleship – was probably sold to Universal studios as Top Gun meets Independence Day .
It makes “Top Gun” look like the work of Orson Welles.
During that time, it has as much in common with the “Transformers” movies as it does with “Armageddon,” “War of the Worlds,” “Battle: Los Angeles” and even the patriotic, gung-ho spirit of “Top Gun.”
For those brief moments Battleship becomes something different, a jaunty mélange of Top Gun patriotism and Starship Troopers looniness.
And Kitsch, who didn't exactly collect out-of-this-world notices for "John Carter," proves detractors wrong by showing he can convincingly carry an action film, even when his character is a "Top Gun" clone.
Produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer ("Beverly Hills Cop," "Top Gun"), "Bad Boys" is, not surprisingly, a high-concept cops-and-robbers film with a role-reversal plot that could, if necessary, be made to fit on the head of a pin.
Un plan « machiavélique » qui débuta en 1995 avec le retour du cinéaste Tony Scott (Crimson Tide), responsable de certains des plus gros succès du duo au cours de la décennie précédente, dont Top Gun et Beverly Hills Cop 2, mais aussi avec l’embauche d’un nouveau poulain qui figurait déjà parmi les réalisateurs les plus en vue du monde de la publicité et du vidéoclip aux États-Unis : Michael Bay.
It should come as no surprise that this endless spectacle of tired comedy routines and overblown action fare was produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, action-meisters of such '80s blockbusters as "Beverly Hills Cop" and "Top Gun."
The movie, released in 1986 from director Tony Scott ("Days of Thunder," "Crimson Tide") and producer Jerry Bruckheimer ("Armageddon," "Pearl Harbor"), was an immediate success.
I think that's why the movie—which, from a standpoint of acting or screenwriting or sexual politics or soundtrack-selection is just a bad, bad movie—I think that's why it's easier to take than something like Pearl Harbor.
(We know this because they do an illegal flyby, just like in Top Gun .)
There's Top Gun: Two hotshot pilots, Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), are called on the carpet by their commanding officer, James Doolittle (Alec Baldwin), for their hotshot high jinks.
"Top Gun" meets "Star Wars" in a rousing series of air assaults that have terror written all over them.
Incidentally, although this Walt Disney movie is based, inspired and even partially informed by a real event referred to as Pearl Harbor, the movie is actually based on the movies "Top Gun," "Titanic" and "Saving Private Ryan."
More specifically, a Michael Bay-Jerry Bruckheimer production, Bruckheimer being the mastermind, with his late partner Don Simpson, of such thumping paeans to male aggression and bonding as "Top Gun" and "Days of Thunder."
Count on lethal asteroids to replace UFOs in the Zeitgeist Watch; actor Steve Buscemi's asking price to triple; and producer Jerry Bruckheimer to end up back where he was in the era of Top Gun (1986), before his dead partner, Don Simpson, blew the duo's credibility on cocaine, cars, and call girls.
So is Armageddon really The Thrill Ride of the Summer, a 10+, Bruce Willis 's Best Action Movie Since Die Hard, and the Star Wars/Top Gun/Towering Inferno of the '90s?
Party hearty before the big blowup: That's the motto of "Armageddon," the latest action extravaganza from producer Jerry Bruckheimer ("Top Gun," "The Rock," "Con Air").
The co-creator of "The Rock," "Top Gun" and "Con Air" never met an explosion he didn't like, so there's a new catastrophe every 20 minutes or so.
"The Rock" is the last production of the late Don Simpson and his partner Jerry Bruckheimer, who were responsible for frenetic films such as "Top Gun" and "Days of Thunder."
Simpson lives on in Tom Cruise's Top Gun flash, in Eddie Murphy's Beverly Hills Cop swagger and in Sean Connery's daredevil insolence in The Rock, a fitting wild-ride finale for the team of Simpson and Bruckheimer.
Producers Jerry Bruckheimer and the late Don Simpson have a highly-successful resume that includes Top Gun and Crimson Tide.
This final film from the production team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson (who died in January) certainly has the energy and professional look of their best action films, "Top Gun" and last year's "Crimson Tide."
In style, substance and star power, "The Rock" offers precisely the same infinitely marketable, high-octane mix of buff sex, Top 40 rock and hard-core action that Simpson and his partner Jerry Bruckheimer calibrated to near-perfection in such '80s milestones as "Flashdance" and "Top Gun."
The makers of such action blockbusters as "Crimson Tide" and "Top Gun," they are masters of the format.
Advertisement
Mostly, there’s Cruise, who at 55 looks a decade and a half younger, and can still fill a cockpit with star power some 30 years after “Top Gun.”
The best idea that “American Made” has to offer involves casting Tom Cruise, whose hit films “Risky Business” and “Top Gun” made him the toothy poster boy for the rampant materialism and the lighter side of military expansion of the very same era when Seal’s story was happening in real life, in a role that theoretically stands as a rebuke to those notions.
An accessory that Cruise made wholly his own in “Top Gun,” they connote as much rakish bravado and slightly impenetrable machismo now as they did then — 1986, coincidentally the year that the action in “ American Made ,” which spans eight fast years of Carter-to-Reagan-era governmental skulduggery, comes to a startling head.
Mercifully, the ‘70s and ‘80s-set “American Made” comes without a Bryan Adams-sung theme song, but Doug Liman’s film cannot overcome the strangeness of Cruise attempting to reclaim “Top Gun” glory as a twentieth century good old boy.
Whether it’s Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia or Maverick in Top Gun, the 55-year-old actor burrows deep into his characters’ ability to hustle, scam or charm all those around him.
Doug Liman’s pulpy action-comedy about a pilot who smuggles drugs for the Medellin Cartel in the ’80s has Cruise sporting feathered hair, hip-hugging jeans, and sleek leather jackets, invoking the cool he exuded in his Top Gun days.
Take Nod (Josh Hutcherson) for example, a brave but reckless warrior who feels that the rules don’t always apply to him, kind of like Maverick from Top Gun.
And some of the flying sequences - dogfights above and below the tree canopy - play like Top Gun, only the pilots are armed with bows and arrows and sport elf warrior garb.