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Jock aversion stopped one writer from catching the Tom Cruise film that launched a thousand action sequences. But how is a film so influential so unimaginative?

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In 1986, I was 15 and gorging myself on movies of every stripe, so why did I never see Top Gun? My subsequent admiration for Crimson Tide and Enemy of the State proves I’m not immune to the magnetism of its director, Tony Scott. And it can’t be that I was averse to the glossy, pumped-up hedonism that was the stock-in-trade of the super-producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, since I’d coughed up my hard-earned paper-round money to see Beverly Hills Cop twice the previous year. Most likely, the deal-breaker was Tom Cruise. He was too much like the jocks with their laminated skin and torch-beam teeth who flicked one another with towels in the PE changing rooms or mimed slap bass to Level 42 at the school disco. I could get all that for free any time; I didn’t need to pay to watch it on screen.
My resistance to Cruise weakened in the late 90s, around the time of Jerry Maguire and Eyes Wide Shut, so it was with something less than dread that I sat down recently for a first viewing of Top Gun. Cruise plays the trainee fighter pilot Pete Mitchell, known to anyone who loves him (and boy, does everyone love him) as Maverick. All the characters have nicknames. Maverick’s best buddy is Goose (Anthony Edwards). His nemesis is Iceman (Val Kilmer). Even their superiors are called Viper (Tom Skerritt) and Jester (Michael Ironside). The US navy consultants listed in the end credits have nicknames, too, such as Rat, Bozo and Flex. The only ones who don’t are women: Charlie (Kelly McGillis), the instructor who becomes Maverick’s squeeze, and Carole (Meg Ryan), Goose’s wife. Carole gets two scenes, larking around in the first one and then – sad face – grieving over her husband in the second. Should I have prefaced that plot-point with a spoiler alert? I don’t think so. The moment you find out he has a family, this Goose is cooked. Continue reading...