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.
Showing posts with label Top Gun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Top Gun. Show all posts
Sunday, August 29, 2010
M's Musings on TOP GUN
Top Gun. Dir. Tony Scott. Screenplay by Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. Based on an article by Ehud Yonay. Ft. Tom Cruise and Kelly McGinnis. Prod. Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Paramount Pictures, 1986.
Up until yesterday, my only experience with the film Top Gun was going on the ride at Canada's Wonderland. As you waited for 2+ hours for two minutes of head banging, body jiggling, feet dangling thrills, you walked through a bunch of paraphernalia from the film that included some costumes, and, if I remember correctly, even a small plane. Though it was well laid out to make for a more interesting line-up, if you hadn't seen the movie, it is really hard to appreciate cut-scenes and dialogue. The film was at least ten years old by the time I first went on the coaster, and that would have been when I was ten. It wasn't until 2008 (22 years later) that it was renamed "Flight Deck" and all the memorbilia was taken down. I wish I could have appreciated it during the dozens of times I waited in that mind-numbing line.
And now that it is too late, I can. Top Gun was the bestselling film of 1986, when Tom Cruise was less crazy and a heck of a lot younger. What was most interesting about the film, to me, was (what seemed to me to be) the seamless inclusion of an actual fighter squadron of Top Gun pilots and use of various military insignia. When doing some "research" for this post, I was quickly enthralled with the various military approvals and censorship that went into make this film the "right" kind of depiction of the US Army. Removing course language, removing Charlie's officer status to allow for a "legal" relationship between enlisted personnel and a civilian contractor, was just a start. Removing references to Cuba, a then hot button issue, and replacing it with "international waters" allowed for the some of the political elements of a film about the military to somehow become more suppressed.
Patriotism in this film was both more blatant and more hidden than its equivalent in recent years. By making it about a specific flight school whose job was to be the best at killing bad guys in airplanes, there is no doubt that the film largely stands as a helpful reminder to the 1980s public that America is #1, with the best of the best (Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer) taking big risks and being dreamy while they saved the homeland from evil and uncertainty. This kind of carefully constructed narrative about army life and the trials and tribulations remains a cornerstone of American film making, though I would say that these narratives have become more complicated, and now at least rely more heavily on the past when the story they want to tell is a straightforward "Ra-Ra!" tale about America's troops.
One other issue that I discovered in my research is the death of an aerobatic pilot during the film. Art Scholl and his plane were never recovered when he crashed after an attempting a flat spin and losing control. Though the film acknowledged this type of incident through Goose's death, as well as through a dedication at the end of the film, I felt that the reality of the situation could have been better discussed. Perhaps it was at the time? Who knows. Anyway, it is unfortunate to hear of this kind of disaster on a film set.
Now, let's talk about the film. 1980s masculinity, with a leather jacket and a motorcycle, matched with the big hair, skinny jeans 1980s femininity, was occasionally distracting and always interesting to behold. I felt like Meg Ryan and Kelly McGinnis were having a contest over who had the most hair, or at least who could make it look like they had the most hair. I found Charlie, initially introduced as an astrophysicist and top instructor, very quickly took on a submissive role to Maverick and really lost a goodly amount of her power and independence. This strong female lead was really not at all.
The synthesized muzak which was used to score the film pretty annoying, but served to distinguish this as a drama more than an action thriller. This was about people, people! I loved the song in the final credits. T & I rocked out pretty hard to it. Other than that, I found the music really aggravating. But seriously, "Take My Breath Away", for better or worse, had to be introduced to the world somehow. If that was what 80s sex was like, though I am glad I am a product of it... I am glad I will never get to experience it. Yuck-o!
In summation, a fun, predictable movie which is made more fun by the inclusion and control of the American military. Not something that I think could be produced now.
Up until yesterday, my only experience with the film Top Gun was going on the ride at Canada's Wonderland. As you waited for 2+ hours for two minutes of head banging, body jiggling, feet dangling thrills, you walked through a bunch of paraphernalia from the film that included some costumes, and, if I remember correctly, even a small plane. Though it was well laid out to make for a more interesting line-up, if you hadn't seen the movie, it is really hard to appreciate cut-scenes and dialogue. The film was at least ten years old by the time I first went on the coaster, and that would have been when I was ten. It wasn't until 2008 (22 years later) that it was renamed "Flight Deck" and all the memorbilia was taken down. I wish I could have appreciated it during the dozens of times I waited in that mind-numbing line.
And now that it is too late, I can. Top Gun was the bestselling film of 1986, when Tom Cruise was less crazy and a heck of a lot younger. What was most interesting about the film, to me, was (what seemed to me to be) the seamless inclusion of an actual fighter squadron of Top Gun pilots and use of various military insignia. When doing some "research" for this post, I was quickly enthralled with the various military approvals and censorship that went into make this film the "right" kind of depiction of the US Army. Removing course language, removing Charlie's officer status to allow for a "legal" relationship between enlisted personnel and a civilian contractor, was just a start. Removing references to Cuba, a then hot button issue, and replacing it with "international waters" allowed for the some of the political elements of a film about the military to somehow become more suppressed.
Patriotism in this film was both more blatant and more hidden than its equivalent in recent years. By making it about a specific flight school whose job was to be the best at killing bad guys in airplanes, there is no doubt that the film largely stands as a helpful reminder to the 1980s public that America is #1, with the best of the best (Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer) taking big risks and being dreamy while they saved the homeland from evil and uncertainty. This kind of carefully constructed narrative about army life and the trials and tribulations remains a cornerstone of American film making, though I would say that these narratives have become more complicated, and now at least rely more heavily on the past when the story they want to tell is a straightforward "Ra-Ra!" tale about America's troops.
One other issue that I discovered in my research is the death of an aerobatic pilot during the film. Art Scholl and his plane were never recovered when he crashed after an attempting a flat spin and losing control. Though the film acknowledged this type of incident through Goose's death, as well as through a dedication at the end of the film, I felt that the reality of the situation could have been better discussed. Perhaps it was at the time? Who knows. Anyway, it is unfortunate to hear of this kind of disaster on a film set.
Now, let's talk about the film. 1980s masculinity, with a leather jacket and a motorcycle, matched with the big hair, skinny jeans 1980s femininity, was occasionally distracting and always interesting to behold. I felt like Meg Ryan and Kelly McGinnis were having a contest over who had the most hair, or at least who could make it look like they had the most hair. I found Charlie, initially introduced as an astrophysicist and top instructor, very quickly took on a submissive role to Maverick and really lost a goodly amount of her power and independence. This strong female lead was really not at all.
The synthesized muzak which was used to score the film pretty annoying, but served to distinguish this as a drama more than an action thriller. This was about people, people! I loved the song in the final credits. T & I rocked out pretty hard to it. Other than that, I found the music really aggravating. But seriously, "Take My Breath Away", for better or worse, had to be introduced to the world somehow. If that was what 80s sex was like, though I am glad I am a product of it... I am glad I will never get to experience it. Yuck-o!
In summation, a fun, predictable movie which is made more fun by the inclusion and control of the American military. Not something that I think could be produced now.
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