B71: A Top Officer and a Gentleman Gun

 I watched half an hour of Top Gun recently; it’s such an extraordinary artefact, now so eaten up by its own parodies and tributes, it’s hard to believe this is the real thing.

It’s certainly one of the most influential films of all time, and, after all, enjoyable enough on whichever level you want to deal with it.

I watched Top Gun before I watched An Officer and a Gentleman, though most of the right generation will have experienced them in the correct order, since they were both enormous box-office hits.

Top Gun nicks so much from An Officer and a Gentleman – setting, storyline, lead character, father issues, dead best friend, local girl romance, motorbike, white uniform, power ballad - yet they are very different films in feel.

Even the first time I watched it, I was shocked by how dirty and sordid An Officer and a Gentleman was in parts, how raw the emotions were, how precise the chraracterisations were. Sure, it’s not some indie drama, it’s a romantic blockbuster, but it’s a very very good film – realistic, shocking and moving at times.

Nothing in Top Gun seems at all real, but it is endlessly quotable, somewhat thrilling and astonishingly shiny.

Gere, though handsome beyond comparison, always manages to portray an insecure narcissism which humanises his characters, in a way that Cruise has little interest in doing.

Even though Star Wars and Jaws are seen as the start of the blockbuster age, it is the look that films started to have in the mid-80s which strikes me as the biggest shift. The same is somewhat true of pop music – Blondie to Madonna, An Officer and a Gentleman to Top Gun….

I really love those early blockbusters which are much more sweary and grotty than their reputation suggests they’ll be, from Saturday Night Fever and Jaws to Trading Places and An Officer and a Gentleman.

Who knows what Top Gun: Maverick will bring?