M: This airplane almost looks like a... Space... Flier. Spaceship. Yeah, spaceship.
M: (viewing command centre) Pfft. Present day. What present are you in? Look at the bleepy-bleeps!
(Movie dialogue)
- Ghost Rider, we have an unknown aircraft. Vector 090 for bogey.
- Who's up there?
- Cougar, Merlin, Maverick and Goose.
M: You're just making things up, now.
Michael Ironside was completely miscast in this film - or perhaps it would be better to say his character was completely underplayed. I didn't care about shirtless volleyball or take-me-serious pouting bimbos or bromance. I cared about fighter jets shooting missiles and flipping out in the air and Michael Ironside. His steely glare and all-business demeanor makes him a key candidate for any movie that demands a hardass. Truly, this film would have been much better if it were based around the lead Top Gun instructor with a full career of killing dudes at Mach 5 and a sordid past full of betrayal and military intrigue.
You could play up a broken family life and bouts of alcoholism, his PTSD dragging him back to the same strip club weekly where he makes shady deals with local crime lords to ship Packages from one training zone to another. I could see him greasing the palms of higher ups and, weeping, punching his mirror at home one morning when he makes eye contact with himself while straightening out his uniform. Bright-eyed Maverick could ask him for career advice, and Ironside would smoothly suggest a death-squad posting that would ultimately lead to his ravenous addiction to some exotic drug and use his desperate need to some dark government agency's own cruel ends. When confronted about his duplicity, Mike would calmly tell him that this is the way things are and, by the way, don't ever address me again.
I first saw Michael Ironside in Scanners, a Canadian film from 1981 written and directed by the genious Daivd Cronenberg. Clearly he saw in a young(ish) Michael Ironside what everyone else sees immediately: a hard as nails motherfucker who chews up rocks and spits out gravel. He sounds like he's gargling broken glass and couldn't care less. It's that reposed, begrudging, hard-ass mentality; the guy who gets dragged back into war over and over and accepts it in all its infinite complication knowingly while preforming his function as steady and true as a plowman. Michael Ironside has made impact in my life not only as a screen presence, but also as a voice actor. You might not know it from this movie, but he plays the all-powerful dark technowarlock of shadow Sam Fisher, from the Splinter Cell series, and for this he has won my heart eternal.
But he's not all hard-edge. So much of his work communicates well because of the humanity behind it all, something I saw not one flicker of in poncy Tom Cruise while he minced back and fourth across the screen whimpering under the angst of being an incredible but misunderstood hotshot fighter pilot. Who cares? What does it matter? This man, however good he is at flying jets, is a total drone and has zero reverence for the fact that he's planning his life around executing people with equisite thirty million dollar killing machines. He doesn't care about his nation, or foreign affairs, or anything like that. He's just stoked to go fast and win.
Nobody cares.
The things that made this movie great were the pacing, the buildup, the realistic feeling of actually watching what probably happens behind closed doors at flight academy... I really do believe that they're a bunch of self-absorbed preppy (pardon the pun) flyboys who are totally oblivious to the role they'll inevitably play in terrorizing less fortunate countries into allowing themselves to be exploited by American buisness. But nobody would tell you the writing is superb, because if it was, nobody would believe it. These people are not capable of depth and self-awareness. You can't be an interesting, compelling and philosophically sound person if you're a twenty-two year old jet pilot dedicated to being the mindless tool of your government; these people didn't undergo that career so that they could affect change and make the world better. They saw jets doing rollovers at an airshow when they were kids and said, "Cool!" and never thought past it.
Did I feel like the movie did its job? Of course. This was the US Military funded jerkoff session with a love story shoehorned in so that any given couple can watch it and walk away with something. The characters were largely unlikeable, the love story was boring, and the message had a banal undercurrernt of evil pro-death patriotism. Don't think about it, just be a fighter pilot, because look how cool they are. It'll be great. Chicks love fighter pilots, and everyone will respect you, especially now that this movie has come out.
Nevermind all that. The big End Conflict was very difficult to imagine. Six presumably Russian Migs loaded up and just converged on two F-14s? Why? For what? Was this the attack they'd been planning all along? Where did their order come from? You had better believe that if anything like that ever happened - and indeed, happened to the extent that the story made it to "... the front pages of all the English-speaking world." America would launch into all out war. The rest of those jets would be fucking scrambled. Before Maverick ever made it out there, bombs would be prepped and Black Op teams would be executing foreign nationals, lunging from the closets they were already hiding in. The other side denies the incident? Who the fuck cares? It'd be bombs over Baghdad, folks. America is not the underdog.
Having said all that, if you turn your brain off and get into the eighties short-shorts swing of it you just might catch yourself having fun. Whenever America makes a movie about any military branch you can bet on ten gallons of polish and a commitee-approved storyline/script. The underplayed brainless horror of what we're really witnessing and calculated maniplating Big Brother skull-fuckery aside, I like Top Gun and re-watch it periodically. If only for Michael Ironside.
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