Rewind, Review, and Re-Rate: ‘Top Gun’: Top Gun’s Rotten Tomatoes Rating Sums up Everything Wrong With the World Today

Mark Jackson
Updated:
Having just reviewed “Top Gun: Maverick,” it’s apropos and high time to review the 1986 original.

I remember seeing “Top Gun” with my buddy Steve when it first hit the theaters in ‘86. We took Steve’s 17-year-old cousin Joshua: a classic, insouciant, gum-snapping, hyper-critical, too-cool-for-school, and definitely too cool for “Top Gun” (or so he thought), typical American teen ingrate.

Two hours later—that is, two hours of dizzying fighter jet barrel rolls, violent aircraft carrier landings, Sidewinder missile and Vulcan Gatling cannon blasting, and insane levels of fighter jock testosterone later—the kid walked out of the theater with a mile-wide grin on his face. You couldn’t shut him up for the entire trip home. A happy, happy boy was Josh.

Lt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom Cruise) and his state of the art of American air combat superiority (in 1986), the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, in "Top Gun: Maverick." (Paramount Pictures)
Lt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom Cruise) and his state of the art of American air combat superiority (in 1986), the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, in "Top Gun: Maverick." Paramount Pictures

That’s what a good war movie does for the male gender who were born with normal levels of God-given testosterone. Young, warrior-talented alphas, with elevated levels of testosterone, go sign up to learn to fly dangerous jets so they can keep America safe. “Top Gun” was a game-changer when it came out. Does the military count on that and occasionally fund movies as recruitment ads? Sure. It’s called marketing. Why do we need it? America’s grown soft. Military service is largely no longer seen as honorable. But we still need the military.

As Richard Grenier put it: “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” Grenier was actually reformulating something Rudyard Kipling said: “Men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.”
(Front row): Goose (Anthony Edwards, L), and Maverick (Tom Cruise) engage in some slightly hostile teasing of their flight instructor in "Top Gun: Maverick." (Paramount Pictures)
(Front row): Goose (Anthony Edwards, L), and Maverick (Tom Cruise) engage in some slightly hostile teasing of their flight instructor in "Top Gun: Maverick." Paramount Pictures

36 Years Later

What kind of rating does “Top Gun” have on Rotten Tomatoes today? Critics: 58 percent, audiences: 83 percent. The phrase “toxic masculinity” comes up. Critics of any kind have never been in danger of being suspected of having abundant testosterone, but now, with Marxism-generated feminism winning the war of the sexes, and some female critics suggesting that the job of film criticism no longer be open to the male gender due to our “systemic toxicity,” what audiences clearly have a preference for is no longer being accurately reflected in, or addressed by, the critic community.
There’s a kid on TikTok right now, explaining what it means to be of the cake gender. Cake? Yeah, like, if you feel fluffy, and maybe layered, you can identify as ... cake. And she’s not being ironic. If anything sums up the problems of the world today, IMHO, it’s cake gender. And “Top Gun’s” 58 percent critic rating. But, more on that later. First things first.

The Original ‘Top Gun’

“Top Gun” kicks off with a hotshot Navy pilot flying inverted, canopy-to-canopy, two feet above a Russian MiG jet. The American pilot’s radio intercept officer (the guy in the backseat) snaps a Polaroid of the bogey (enemy pilot) and then extends his middle finger. His pilot then barrel-rolls right-side-up, and vamooses, supersonically.

This highly frowned-upon cowboy stunt affords pilot Lt. Pete Mitchell (Tom Cruise) a level of notoriety among his Navy flyboy brethren, as well as in the extended community of Navy personnel with elevated enough clearance levels to be privy to such classified showdowns with enemy aircraft.

The upshot is that due to this dust-up, this pilot, call-sign Maverick, and his RIO, call-sign Goose (Anthony Edwards) are selected for the Navy’s elite Fighter Weapons School, Top Gun, which is dedicated to honing the aerial dog-fighting skill set, and producing a group that is basically the SEAL team 6 of Navy pilots: the best of the best. The flyboys will compete with each other to win the trophy of becoming the “top gun.”

Maverick (Tom Cruise) playing beach volleyball in "Top Gun: Maverick." (Paramount Pictures)
Maverick (Tom Cruise) playing beach volleyball in "Top Gun: Maverick." Paramount Pictures

Legacy Fighter Jock

There are 7 different types of Navy SEAL: 1) Smurf SEAL 2) Rough-upbringing SEAL 3) Brawler SEAL 4) Proto-SEAL 5) Gamer SEAL 6) Ivy League SEAL 7) Legacy SEAL

Maverick’s a legacy Navy fighter pilot. His father was a top-notch F-4 Phantom pilot during the Vietnam War, until he and his plane mysteriously disappeared deep in Indian Country, never to be seen or heard from again. And this is the source of the movie’s tension: Maverick’s deceased dad had gotten a bad rep in the military and had been branded a coward.

Maverick’s need to prove himself, stand out, and not be lumped in with his father’s apparent loser-status is why he has that call-sign: he refuses to fit in. While a brilliant stick jockey, he’s unpredictable, unreliable, hot-headed, and dangerous.

His toughest competitor, “Iceman” (Val Kilmer in his most iconic role), is his polar opposite: cool-headed and highly efficient. These two are at immediate loggerheads. But Maverick’s reckless hot-dogging stunts also scare Goose, and deeply concern Top Gun’s commanding officer Mike “Viper” Metcalfe (Tom Skerritt).

(L–R) Maverick (Tom Cruise), Goose (Anthony Edwards), Jester (Michael Ironside), and Viper (Tom Skerritt) in "Top Gun: Maverick." (Paramount Pictures)
(L–R) Maverick (Tom Cruise), Goose (Anthony Edwards), Jester (Michael Ironside), and Viper (Tom Skerritt) in "Top Gun: Maverick." Paramount Pictures

Romance

“Top Gun” settles quickly into alternating ground and air scenes. The dogfight scenes are brilliant, the earthbound scenes between the pilots are lots of fun, and the romance is fairly abysmal. Let’s address the romance right now and get it out of the way.

One of the instructors at the flying school is Charlie, an attractive civilian aeronautics expert (Kelly McGillis) whose initial interest in Maverick is how he and Goose snapped that MiG pilot’s picture. Their romance kicks off with the now legendary bar karaoke scene (long before karaoke was invented) where Mav and Goose serenade Charlie with the Righteous Brother’s “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.”

(Center): Goose (Anthony Edwards, L), and Maverick (Tom Cruise) team-serenade their (unbeknownst to them) flight instructor (Kelly McGillis, L) in "Top Gun: Maverick." (Paramount Pictures)
(Center): Goose (Anthony Edwards, L), and Maverick (Tom Cruise) team-serenade their (unbeknownst to them) flight instructor (Kelly McGillis, L) in "Top Gun: Maverick." Paramount Pictures
Compared with the smoking-hot chemistry between Kelly McGillis and Harrison Ford in “Witness,” Cruise and McGillis have zero chemistry, which is sad, but doesn’t affect the movie in the slightest because “Top Gun” isn’t about that; it’s a Warrior/Magician movie, not a Lover movie.
Top Gun: Maverick” is a King movie. But before a man can transition from Warrior to King, he needs to balance his four male quadrants with the help of a mature-male community.
Mike "Viper" Metcalfe, Navy brass and flight instructor in "Top Gun: Maverick." (Paramount Pictures)
Mike "Viper" Metcalfe, Navy brass and flight instructor in "Top Gun: Maverick." Paramount Pictures
And so when Maverick’s confidence is shattered by a training accident involving Goose, he visits officer Metcalfe at home on a Sunday morning. Metcalfe sets the story straight for Maverick. Turns out he flew with Maverick’s old man in ‘Nam, and the classified details of dogfights happening across map demarcations that the military didn’t approve of for public consumption, show that Maverick’s dad was, in Metcalfe’s words, “A heroic sun-of-a-...” who died like the apex aviator he was, taking many enemy planes with him. And that’s really all a young man needs to hear to get his act together and go thoroughly dominate in the next aerial combat situation, as a dedicated wingman who steadfastly refuses to abandon his lead pilot.

Flight and Dogfight Portrayal

Lt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom Cruise) in the cockpit of his F-14 Tomcat in "Top Gun: Maverick." (Paramount Pictures)
Lt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom Cruise) in the cockpit of his F-14 Tomcat in "Top Gun: Maverick." Paramount Pictures

Director Tony Scott (now deceased) and Gary Gutierrez, his supervisor of photographic special effects gave audiences the ultimate, “you are there” experience. The special challenge aerial scenes always present in movies is that audiences will become spatially disoriented. Normally we’re acclimated to seeing things within a frame that clearly delineates up, down, left, and right, but fighter pilots live in a roller coaster world of 360-degree turns known as pitch, yaw, and roll.

One of the rarified “right stuff” talents pilots have is a brain that’s loaded with spatial awareness intelligence that can make immediate sense of the viciously spinning optics and inner-ear gyroscope assaults. Not to mention keeping track of all that while experiencing the pressure of up to 9G’s (2,000 pounds of compounded gravitational pressure on the body), where blood is being pulled out of the head towards the limbs, resulting in the loss of peripheral vision, and the world shrinks until it looks like one is viewing it through a toilet paper roll.

Interesting factoid: “Some animals are really good at dealing with hypergravity though. When flying in a straight line, dragonflies can accelerate with up to 4G of force. When they turn corners, this increases to 9G. And they don’t even need to wear a flight suit.”

Lt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom Cruise) experiencing tunnel vision while pulling G's in the cockpit of his F-14 Tomcat in "Top Gun: Maverick." (Paramount Pictures)
Lt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom Cruise) experiencing tunnel vision while pulling G's in the cockpit of his F-14 Tomcat in "Top Gun: Maverick." Paramount Pictures

The remarkable achievement of “Top Gun” was that it gave us close to 10 aerial encounters that were so well choreographed we can actually follow them. This was “Top Gun’s” crowning achievement: putting us in the cockpit for the first time and giving us a mind-blowing vicarious experience of being in an actual fighter plane dogfight. That, and the macho, high testosterone jockeying of flyboys, and the joys of alpha-male camaraderie which always has an element of the kid game “King of the Hill.”

(L–R) Maverick (Tom Cruise), Chipper (Adrian Pasdar), Wolfman (Barry Tubb) Goose (Anthony Edwards), Slider (Rick Rossovich), Ice Man (Val Kilmer), and Sundown (Clarence Gilyard, Jr.) in "Top Gun: Maverick." (Paramount Pictures)
(L–R) Maverick (Tom Cruise), Chipper (Adrian Pasdar), Wolfman (Barry Tubb) Goose (Anthony Edwards), Slider (Rick Rossovich), Ice Man (Val Kilmer), and Sundown (Clarence Gilyard, Jr.) in "Top Gun: Maverick." Paramount Pictures

One note: my memory of Ice Man was that he was completely out for himself. He’s not. He’s cocky and supremely competitive, but he’s also simply more mature and careful than Maverick. On a few occasions he goes out of his way to compliment Maverick. That’s a King move—he attempts to foster teamwork and safety.

(L–R) Slider (Rick Rossovich), Ice Man (Val Kilmer), Goose (Anthony Edwards), and Maverick (Tom Cruise) in "Top Gun: Maverick." (Paramount Pictures)
(L–R) Slider (Rick Rossovich), Ice Man (Val Kilmer), Goose (Anthony Edwards), and Maverick (Tom Cruise) in "Top Gun: Maverick." Paramount Pictures

Ultimately we need movies like “Top Gun” and we still need pilots and we still need the military. We need pilots with brain gyroscope talent who identify as having an overabundance of testosterone. Probably anyone of the cake gender won’t want that job anyhow.

Movie poster for "Top Gun."
Movie poster for "Top Gun."
‘Top Gun’ Director: Tony Scott Starring: Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards, Meg Ryan, Kelly McGillis, Tom Skerritt MPAA Rating: PG Release Date: May 16, 1986 Running Time: 1 hours, 50 minutes Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars for coolness, 2 stars for bad romance
Mark Jackson
Mark Jackson
Film Critic
Mark Jackson is the chief film critic for The Epoch Times. In addition to the world’s number-one storytelling vehicle—film, he enjoys martial arts, weightlifting, motorcycles, vision questing, rock-climbing, qigong, oil painting, and human rights activism. Jackson earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Williams College, followed by a classical theater training, and has 20 years’ experience as a New York professional actor, working in theater, commercials, and television daytime dramas. He narrated The Epoch Times audiobook “How the Specter of Communism is Ruling Our World,” which is available on iTunes and Audible. Jackson is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic.
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