On May 12, 1986, Paramount Pictures produced a film about an elite school for the top 1 percent of United States Navy pilots. Its purpose was to make a good film about the lost art of aerial combat and to ensure that Paramount Pictures made a ton of money.
They succeeded. (On the latter point.)
Today, Paramount is trying again to create a film that succeeds on both of those fronts. The studio calls it:
1986’s Top Gun—with apologies to David French, whose ire I’ve already earned for expressing this opinion—is not a good movie. The plot is barely there, the action scenes are so-so, and the romance isn’t fleshed out enough to be remotely believable. And by “the romance,” I mean the one between Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise) and Charlie Blackwood (Kelly McGillis). The tension between Maverick and his wingman Lt. (j.g.) Nick “Goose” Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards) or Maverick and his rival Lt. Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer) is far more palpable. I can only assume that the original’s outsized cultural presence is somehow tied to the fact that cocaine usage in the U.S. peaked in the 1980s.
Alec Dent is a former culture editor and staff writer for The Dispatch.
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