You want to talk nostalgia? Perhaps nothing hit the patriotic ’80s kid like Top Gun‘s opening scene on the carrier’s flattop. That was pure cinematic wizardry, the very pinnacle of the era’s patriotic pictures. Harold Faltermeyer’s slow synth pulse rising out of the darkness for morning flight ops, steam dancing across the Enterprise‘s deck, the F-14’s twin turbofans igniting to afterburner, the crew’s delicate choreography, sunlight breaking over the flattop and building a slow, steady tension until it breaks with Kenny Loggins’s soaring electric guitar launching Tomcats into the great blue. It was solemn, muscular, technological, and almost religious in its reverence for U.S. airpower, an anthem for the golden center of the American jet age.
It did almost half a billion dollars at the box office, inflation-adjusted, of course, and topped the charts as 1986’s highest-grossing movie. It ran in theaters for more than half a year. But it was more than just a financial smash. Top Gun was the living, breathing embodiment of 1980s America: cocky, confident, gutsy, technologically dominant, and glamorous. And maybe a little bit* gay. Vietnam was in the rearview mirror. The military was cool again. And director Tony Scott’s brilliance was that he got this hallowed vibe to eager audiences without the tedious moralizing so common in today’s Hollywood.
* Quentin Tarantino could not be reached for comment: