FIRST ‘TOP GUN’ PREMIERED IN SAN DIEGO 36 YEARS AGO

“Top Gun: Maverick” premiered in San Diego last week, almost 36 years after the first “Top Gun” opened at Mann’s Cinema 21 in Mission Valley.

From The Tribune, Friday, May 16, 1986:

TOP GUN

MOVIE’S ACTION EQUALS ITS HYPE

By Bill Hagen, Tribune Film/theater Critic

When a movie is pushed as hard before general release as “Top Gun,” two possibilities come to mind: It’s a movie in trouble, or it’s a movie with monstrous hit stamped all over it.

Well, the only foreseeable trouble for “Top Gun” involves accountants and bookkeepers, who are likely to burn out a few calculators keeping up with the box-office grosses. And that’s not even counting the sale of Tom Cruise posters. This is going to be a big, big movie, as it’s entitled to be.

“Top Gun,” much of which was shot at Miramar Naval Air Station, is a seat-of-thepants action movie that explodes on the screen at about Mach 2, eases off on the throttle to work in a little romance, then revs up again for a breathtakingly exciting showdown featuring the greatest aerial sequences this side of combat footage.

“Top Gun” is what Navy pilots call, with a trace of awe from a group not easily awed, the prestigious Fighter Weapons School at Miramar, a school which admits only the top 1 percent of those pilots, the best of the best. And it’s to this school that Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise) and his radar intercept officer, Lt. Nick “Goose” Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards) are assigned after a harrowing, heroic but foolhardy encounter with Soviet-built jet fighters over the Indian Ocean, an encounter that tests wills but stops short of combat.

The screenplay by Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. fits a formula, but a very successful formula, sort of like an airborne “Rocky” at the speed of sound. Much of the movie is devoted to training at Top Gun, and much of that training boils down to a competition for top honors between Maverick and an equally hot pilot named Iceman (Val Kilmer), competition that entails yet more thrilling, choreographic aerial footage, for which director

Tony Scott remarkably just about puts the audience in the cockpit.

These pilots are young men who constantly live on the edge, attacking life. They play as hard as they work, with the same determination, the same fierce competitiveness, the same arrogance. So cocksure are they, even their hair seems to swagger.

And none works or plays harder than Maverick, a pilot with great instincts but little discipline who, upon arrival at Miramar, which he sees as a “target- rich environment,” zeroes in on a very attractive woman he sees in a bar. But the woman, who is an astrophysicist named Charlotte (Kelly Mcgillis) and an instructor at Top Gun, shoots down Maverick’s unusual but crude pass. For a while.

The romance is an integral part of the story, and it’s handled with fire and fun by Cruise and Mcgillis, but even at its hottest it still seems almost like a diversion. Such is the exhilarating pace director Scott has established for his movie, right from the magnificent opening scene.

There are also other diversions, some hardly integral, such as Maverick’s mysterious past involving a fighter-pilot father who had been lost over Southeast Asia 20 years earlier under suspicious circumstances. The writers and the di rector try to force a little too much into the story, often just to lend unnecessary sympathy to the brash, bold central character. He’s just fine as is. There’s also the required crisis of confidence, which doesn’t precisely fit the character.

And then there’s the music by Harold Faltermeyer, very effective in building up to action scenes but which, unfortunately, breaks the sound barrier as routinely and frequently as do the pi lots.

But those are merely quibbles. “Top Gun” is one of the best and most exciting action movies in quite a while, with special credit due Jeffrey Kimball, di rector of photography, and Gary Gutierrez, supervisor of special photographic effects.

“Top Gun” is the movie that is going to make Cruise a really major star.