At least initially, Top Gun presents as a defiantly shallow experience. The story of Tom Cruise's Maverick, a Naval hot-shot who encounters a top-secret Soviet aircraft, is told with the glossy visual language of an MTV music video. The plot hinges on a relationship between this young man and an older woman, Kelly McGillis' Charlie Blackwood, a civilian instructor at the TOPGUN Naval academy who has Pentagon-level clearance. Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr.'s screenplay describes Maverick in far younger terms than would be appropriate for a serious-minded military thriller. There's still something of the frat-boy pugilist about him and his desire to transform every encounter or relationship into a kind of game: endless opportunity for Maverick to flash his boyish smile then come out on top. This coping mechanism comes under attack when Maverick is recruited for a secretive wargame that requires heated de-briefs from dangling love interests in front of an audience of chilly peers.
Sport is stressed again, this time in structural terms. Maverick is the small-town star graduating to a college-level arena in which everyone is just as skilled as he is. How will he cope? By sleeping with his professor, of course. Eventually, a creeping doubt in his own abilities as well as an acute identity issue begin to pick away at this Maverick. Characters within the film begin to address him not by the super cool call-sign he self-identifies with but by his less exciting civilian name. This penetration of Maverick's deliberately constructed carapace is doubly troublesome for the young man because his family name carries its own weight. Grins becomes grimaces; exposing imperfect teeth. Maverick's father, Duke Mitchell, was a Vietnam era pilot who perished in such a way that all records of his passing are sealed and stamped confidential. Maverick's true name, Pete Mitchell, initially registers as a kind of invective, deployed to undermine. Eventually though - after Maverick learns the heroic truth of his own father's death - the name takes on a liberating and transformational power of its own. Maverick's late acceptance of this less obviously flashy persona resolves his insecurities, allowing him to become a more complete dogfighter.
Director Tony Scott and cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball employ the commercial beauty of car adverts to bolster an artistic intent that wavers (knowingly) between these softcore pornographies and a seat-of-your-pants coverage that recalls reportage. Male bodies are lovingly appraised, noting the pinkness of their sunburnt skin or the ripple of a flexed muscle. The actors are therefore transformed into products, as adoringly photographed as the F-14 Tomcats that batter in and out of frame during the airborne battles. A clear constant across all Scott's work though is the desire to glimpse (then project) secret moments of genuine expertise; be that Denzel Washington's wounded bear act in Man on Fire or a tight close-up of a pistol ejection port being put through its paces by a dead-eyed Mafiosi in True Romance. Top Gun's opening credits are built around supersonic jets landing then taking off from a frigate at sunset. We don't follow the peeling aircraft though, we stay with the people hustling and prepping for the next influx. The sequence even accounts for the idea that, for these Signal Officers, there's a sense of monotony to this task. They've done it many times before. Scott and Kimball then, assisted by Chris Lebenzon and Billy Weber's edit, draw out the tiny, dreamily focused moments in which these men add flourish to their actions. We see them break - ever so briefly - from a well-drilled discipline to display anachronistic, human moments amongst all the cold military machinery.
