This is THR's 1986 review:
Top Gun is the Navy euphemism for the U.S. Navy's Fighter Weapons School, the training center fro its elite of elite fighter pilots. Top Movie might be the trade euphemism for this certain summer blockbuster from producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer.
Top Gun has all the earmarks of being the biggest grosser since the same duo produced Beverly Hills Cop.
Essentially a fictional process film — showing how pilots get through the grueling/dueling training sessions — Top Gun additionally should tap into the upsurge of popular sentiment regarding the Navy's recent successes in the Mediterranean.
Tom Cruise stars as Maverick, a brash and mega-talented fighter ace whose personal duels sometimes interfere with his flying. Confidence is not his problem — if this guy were a quarterback, he'd be Jim McMahon. In his sights is a stunning astrophysicist (Kelly McGillis) who's his instructor and a rival ace (Val Kilmer) who's unbeatable.
Undeniably the star of this sizzling production, however, are the technical credits and the direction of Tony Scott. Dog-fighting segments are strictly edge-of-the-seaters — immediate repeat business seems likely in the Star Wars manner.
Supervisor of special photographic effects Gary Gutierrez, along with aerial coordinator Dick Stevens and Top Gun Commander Bob Willard deserve highest praise for their full-blown action sequences. The high-flying fight choreography is sensational, and director Scott's shrewd use of subjective shots literally puts one in the cockpit.
Equally involving is the sound work, giving one the feeling of being deckside next to a screeching F-14. Sound supervising editors, Cecelia Hall and George Waters II, as well as the entire sound crew, deserve a thumbs up for their contribution.
The film's intensity mirrors the competitive and wild personalities of the pilots themselves. In this arena, the casting is on-target. Cruise is terrific as the prima donna sky star, charming and egocentric. Kilmer as the Iceman, the top ace is convincingly cool and controlled — in the best of gunslinger traditions. As the love interest, talented McGillis is well-cast and believable, while Tom Skerritt lends the right understanding and edge to his instructor role.
In supporting roles, Rick Rossovich (whose brother Tim was a linebacker at USC and chewed glass as pranks) lends the requisite loony, competitive edge to his preening young pilot role. An additional standout is Anthony Edwards as Cruise's more level-headed but fun-loving partner.
Brimming with humor and fast-paced action, Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr.'s script veers toward the pat side, but for all the right commercial reasons.
Other technical crew members serving with distinction: Jeffrey Kimball (director of photography); John F. DeCuir Jr. (production designer); Billy Weber, Chris Lebenzon (editors); and Virginia Cook, Teri Dorman, Julia Evershade, Frank Howard, Marshall Winn and David Stone (sound editors). —Duane Byrge, originally published on May 9, 1986
Roger Ebert was less impressed:
In the opening moments of "Top Gun," an ace Navy pilot flies upside down about 18 inches above a Russian-built MiG and snaps a Polaroid picture of the enemy pilot. Then he flips him the finger and peels off.
It's a hot-dog stunt, but it makes the pilot (Tom Cruise) famous within the small circle of Navy personnel who are cleared to receive information about close encounters with enemy aircraft. And the pilot, whose code name is Maverick, is selected for the Navy's elite flying school, which is dedicated to the dying art of aerial dogfights.
The best graduate from each class at the school is known as "Top Gun." And there, I think, you have the basic materials of this movie, except, of course, for three more obligatory ingredients in all movies about brave young pilots: (1) the girl, (2) the mystery of the heroic father and (3) the rivalry with another pilot. It turns out that Maverick's dad was a brilliant Navy jet pilot during the Vietnam era, until he and his plane disappeared in unexplained circumstances. And it also turns out that one of the instructors at the flying school is a pretty young brunet (Kelly McGillis) who wants to know a lot more about how Maverick snapped that other pilot's picture.
"Top Gun" settles fairly quickly into alternating ground and air scenes, and the simplest way to sum up the movie is to declare the air scenes brilliant and the earthbound scenes grimly predictable. This is a movie that comes in two parts: It knows exactly what to do with special effects, but doesn't have a clue as to how two people in love might act and talk and think.
Aerial scenes always present a special challenge in a movie.
There's the danger that the audience will become spatially disoriented.
We're used to seeing things within a frame that respects left and right, up and down, but the fighter pilot lives in a world of 360-degree turns. The remarkable achievement in "Top Gun" is that it presents seven or eight aerial encounters that are so well choreographed that we can actually follow them most of the time, and the movie gives us a good secondhand sense of what it might be like to be in a dogfight.
The movie's first and last sequences involve encounters with enemy planes. Although the planes are MiGs, the movie provides no nationalities for their pilots. We're told the battles take place in the Indian Ocean, and that's it. All of the sequences in between take place at Top Gun school, where Maverick quickly gets locked into a personal duel with another brillant pilot, Iceman (Val Kilmer). In one sequence after another, the sound track trembles as the sleek planes pursue each other through the clouds, and, yeah, it's exciting. But the But the love story between Cruise and McGillis is a washout.
It's pale and unconvincing compared with the chemistry between Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay in "Risky Business," and between McGillis and Harrison Ford in "Witness" - not to mention between Richard Gere and Debra Winger in "An Officer and a Gentleman," which obviously inspired "Top Gun." Cruise and McGillis spend a lot of time squinting uneasily at each other and exchanging words as if they were weapons, and when they finally get physical, they look like the stars of one of those sexy new perfume ads. There's no flesh and blood here, which is remarkable, given the almost palpable physical presence McGillis had in "Witness." In its other scenes on the ground, the movie seems content to recycle old cliches and conventions out of countless other war movies.
Wouldn't you know, for example, that Maverick's commanding officer at the flying school is the only man who knows what happened to the kid's father in Vietnam? And are we surprised when Maverick's best friend dies in his arms? Is there any suspense as Maverick undergoes his obligatory crisis of conscience, wondering whether he can ever fly again? Movies like "Top Gun" are hard to review because the good parts are so good and the bad parts are so relentless. The dogfights are absolutely the best since Clint Eastwood's electrifying aerial scenes in "Firefox." But look out for the scenes where the people talk to one another.
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