Top Gun
December 31st marks a very special time of year, film fans: Val Kilmer’s birthday.
Kilmer remains one of the all-time favorite movie stars of your trusty Trailers From Hell correspondent in North Hollywood, and I like to commemorate the occasion with a TFH review, provided it doesn’t yet have a corresponding commentary from a TFH Guru.
This year, we’re covering a movie I figured would absolutely already have a commentary video, one of Kilmer’s biggest hits ever — the original Top Gun (1986).
Granted, Kilmer is merely the co-star here. The Chatsworth native doesn’t even make the flick’s poster, as the third-billed performer behind perhaps the single-biggest movie star in the world circa 2023 (as he arguably was by the end of 1986), Tom Cruise, and an ascendant Kelly McGillis.
Director Tony Scott’s jingoistic (to the point where Kilmer was initially disinterested in the gig), style-over-substance flyboy naval action adventure remains one of the ultimate flicks of its era, a brash, testosterone-fueled Reaganite fever dream slathered in stark, lavish hues courtesy of cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball and Scott’s unique color palette, borne from years of slick ad work. I had forgotten how damn gorgeous this picture is. Though its narrative may be slight, and its love story at times downright flimsy, this is one of the sweatiest, best-looking movies in the incredibly sweaty, incredibly good-looking oeuvres of either director Scott or producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson.
The tale of a brash bunch of arrogant aviators competing in a flight school for the ultimate prize, the film is the first of a classic Tom Cruise formula: the adventures of a rugged, radical hot shot who plays by his own rules but is nevertheless the best in his chosen field. Cruise would go on to repeat this winning narrative pattern in dozens of flicks, hopping from the worlds of pool that same year (The Color Of Money) to, uh, bartending (Cocktail) to NASCAR (Days Of Thunder) to maritime law (A Few Good Men) to world-saving (Edge of Tomorrow, the Mission: Impossible franchise), just to name a few.
Here, he’s Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, with the middle moniker being his self-appointed naval call sign when he’s in the air. Maverick and his Radar Intercept Officer (the co-pilot who occupies the back seat in service of the main flight officer), Lieutenant Junior Grade Nick “Goose” Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards — no, not that one), find themselves en route to Top Gun in Miramir, outside San Diego — the top flight school in the land — after they engage with two hostile MiG-28s over the Indian Ocean using a near-impossible inverted dive to extend a less-than-friendly greeting the hostiles’ way.
At Top Gun, they quickly discover Maverick’s chief competition for top honors in their class: Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Kilmer), who along with his RIO Ron “Slider” Kerner (Rick Rossovich) almost instantly gets adversarial with our dynamic duo.
Iceman stands as one of Kilmer’s signature roles. We can figure out pretty handily why Maverick’s called Maverick. As for Iceman, Goose very helpfully supplies some explicative background on the origins of his nickname early on. It stems from, to quote Goose, “The way he flies — ice cold, no mistakes. He just wears you down. You get bored, frustrated, do something stupid, and he’s gotcha.” Every visual element of his presence here, from his spiky Billy Idol crew cut to his volleyball spinning and pen flipping to his looming stature over the slighter Mavericks, seems designed to irk our nominal protagonist, to push every last button he has.
The two alphas clash quickly, as Iceman’s rigid, methodological approach operates in stark contrast to Maverick’s riskier, more improvisational means to an end. Soon, Iceman is articulating that directly to Maverick, famously claiming, “You’re everyone’s problem. That’s because every time you go up in the air you’re unsafe. I don’t like you because you’re dangerous.”
After Maverick buzzes a radio tower in a daring flyby whilst engaged in a Top Gun training exercise, he and Goose get harshly reprimanded by instructors Mike “Viper” Metcalf (Tom Skerritt, doing his paternal military bad-ass thing) and Rick “Jester” Heatherly (Michael Ironside). The pair seems in danger of being excommunicated from the program entirely, as Skeritt and Ironside privately debate if Maverick’s obvious ability can supersede his “wild card” craziness. His strained relationship with his MIA dad, Duke Mitchell (who officially disappeared in action as a result of pilot error, a story the son doubts), is pretty typical of most Cruise characters, somewhat mirroring Cruise’s own affiliation with an absentee father. In the case of Duke Mitchell, as we’ll eventually discover, dad died a hero, whereas the elder Cruise sure sounds like a villain to me.
Comely instructor Charlotte “Charlie” Blackwood (McGillis) may have a firm policy against dating her pupils, but that evaporates after about 20 minutes of Cruise’s charms. When they finally first consummate their flirtation, however, two of the hottest actors of their generation find themselves in one of the most alien and weirdly dispassionate sex scenes of an otherwise very horny cinematic decade. But because it’s a Tony Scott movie, it’s still lit to the nines. It just feels like he spent more time lighting it than he did instructing his actors. Or maybe they just hated each other.
Soon, things take a decidedly darker turn for Maverick and his new frenemies. When an engine disruption compels Maverick and Goose to abandon their crashing F-14 during a frantic training exercise, Goose dies during the ejection.
A reeling Maverick, convinced he’s somehow culpable for his best friend’s demise. Though a panel ultimately clears him of any wrongdoing and Viper and Charlie both encourage him to move on, he briefly quits the program.
But the man just needed a little more convincing. Ultimately, he returns in time for graduation, though he’ll finish as a runner-up behind his class’ Top Gun champ, Iceman. Ever the good sportsman, Maverick congratulates Iceman — only for a breaking crisis to develop that requires the now-alums’ instant attention. A select group is chosen to take down enemy MiGs (the movie is careful never to identify exactly who the baddies are here, clearly a tactical maneuver to maximize international playability) in the Indian Ocean. As the newly anointed Top Gun victor, Iceman leads this faction. Viper sends Maverick out with the group too, along with his new RIO, Sam “Merlin” Wells (Tim Robbins in an early role). Iceman is vocally worried that a still-mourning Maverick lacks the fitness to provide appropriate support (he’s essentially a backup to their backup), but guess who comes up in the clutch?
Top Gun remains a terrific popcorn entertainment all these years later. Bruckheimer and Simpson notoriously built their fortune on “high concept” fare: flashy, individualist action and adventure stories laced with synergistic tie-in soundtracks. This is one of their best, boasting both a rousingly patriotic synth score from Harold Faltermeyer and some of the most memorable pop hits of its or any day (they give us not just the one but two bona fide classics from yacht rock god Kenny Loggins, the Oscar-winning Berlin track “Take My Breath Away” which is run back four times, and of course, golden oldies from The Righteous Brothers and Jerry Lee Lewis).
In life, the output of the late great Tony Scott was always thought of as the lighter, more ephemeral filmography when compared with the Oscar-winning work of his big brother Ridley, but I’d argue that there’s nothing fleeting about Tony’s utter mastery of action movie storytelling. He was one of the masters of the form, equally adept at photographing aerial combat stuns or shirtless beach volleyball games.
The cast is superlative. Scott catches Cruise, McGillis, Edwards, Rossovich, Tim Robbins, Meg Ryan (as Goose’s widow) and most importantly the birthday boy near the very beginnings of their careers, and everyone brings the proper poise, precision and intensity to these characters. The script, courtesy of Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. (a twosome who would go on to pen another very classically ’80s horse of a different color, the Michael J. Fox business comedy The Secret Of My Success), arrives packed with wordy tech jargon, and in lesser hands some of this terminology just wouldn’t land. In his 2020 memoir Kilmer for one claims he was able to improvise his locker room confrontation scene with Cruise.
Kilmer, our man of the hour, nearly steals the show from Cruise here in limited minutes (not quite, though). His Iceman represents a very specific kind of figure. He’s cocky and clever, yes, but he’s simultaneously very different from Maverick’s brash volatility. It’s incredible how forcefully Kilmer and Cruise are able to delineate the distinctions between these two unforgettable characters, who at least superficially might on the page read as being basically doubles of each other. Every left-of-center choice each actor makes helps inform and color these guys, from Cruise’s bubbling rage hidden, just barely, beneath the veneer of a wide smile and sleek Ray-Bans, to Kilmer’s off-putting tooth chomping.
Scott and Kilmer would go on to collaborate on several projects together. Scott, recognizing that Kilmer was essentially an esoteric character actor trapped in a leading man’s body (much like Brad Pitt, another Scott alum), often cast him in non-starring roles, perhaps so that the Juilliard product could truly let his freak flag fly. Kilmer played the Elvis Presley of Christian Slater’s dreams in the excellent True Romance (1993), a brilliant, dorky FBI agent who helps facilitate Denzel Washington’s time traveling escapades in the criminally under-seen Deja Vu (2006), and a duplicitous triple agent in an episode of Scott’s hit show Numb3rs, “Trust Metric” (2007).