Top Gun

Top Gun

This was so dumb. I loved every second of it.

It baffles me that this was the highest grossing film of 1986 and continues to have a deadly genuine following to this day, because the entire movie reads as hilarious to me. The repressed homosexual overtones have been talked about to death, but they're undeniable and so, so funny in the context of straight men enjoying it in the deeply homophobic time that was the 1980s. It's like a Trojan Horse if the guys were just hanging out outside of the horse and the only reason they were let in is because the castle guards were in deep denial.

This is technically considered an action movie, but there's little to no action. There's dogfighting scenes with real jets, but these scenes are shot in such a confusing way that there's no way to get excited by them. There are shots of guys in the cockpits, and then b-roll footage of jets that looks unrelated to what they're talking about. All of the Star Wars movies were out at this point, so Tony Scott should've known how to make an aerial action scene exciting. It doesn't help that the characters aren't worth caring about at all, but it's really the boring way that the action scenes are shot that keeps me from enjoying them.

There's an unconvincing romance between Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis, which is to be expected in a big cheesy 80s movie, but they have a famous love scene that rings as pretty gross to me. They're against a blue backdrop and we only see their silhouettes, which is a perfectly fine artistic choice for the scene, but then they start to kiss. It's almost like they're two aliens replicating what they think making out is, which is just rubbing their tongues together. It's entirely them licking each other's faces and never kissing at all whatsoever. It's pretty disgusting.

Other things that made me laugh include: the awful men singing loudly and terribly at Kelly McGillis, Meg Ryan somehow having the smaller female role, volleyball, a commander that loudly demands butts, and, my personal favorite, Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards clearly only knowing the first line of "Great Balls of Fire" and just singing that part over and over.

If you love Top Gun you're more than welcome to it. I think I might love it too. Albeit very ironically.