Sure, Top Gun has a plot. It’s essentially the same plot as in many other Tom Cruise movies: Cocky daredevil with daddy issues hits a crisis of confidence but is pep-talked out of it and returns to save the day. Ignore that, however (hey, it’s not hard to do), and you’re left with director Tony Scott’s dazzling flight sequences. The spectacle of the U.S. Navy’s F-14 fighters at work and at play still thrills, maybe because it’s all real and not computer-generated. (So real, in fact, that stunt pilot-aerial photographer Art Scholl fatally crashed into the Pacific while filming a stunt.)
The aerial footage — even with the scary freak accident that kills poor “Goose” (Anthony Edwards) — was widely criticized as being little more than a recruiting ad for the Navy. A quarter-century later, that commercial slickness — all that muscle-flexing and gleaming hardware — seems like the movie’s chief virtue. This is moviemaking stripped to its kinetic essence; nothing matters except what the characters call “the need for speed.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvFc0EPRSI4]