Upon its release, Top Gun was a sensation. The highest-grossing film of the year, it sold 47m cinema tickets in America alone – enough to keep it playing on more than a thousand screens nationwide for five straight months – and shattered home media records. The film was instantly iconic, both for its aerial sequences and for the parts that Pauline Kael called “a shiny homoerotic commercial”. If you ever want to watch the precise moment where Tom Cruise became Tom Cruise, you watch Top Gun.
But that was 36 years ago, and much has changed since then. Tony Scott, the movie’s director, died a decade ago. Tom Cruise became a megastar, lost it all in a bout of silliness then clawed his way back to the top. Top Gun as an entity has plummeted in relevance, too; overtaken by decades of bigger and flashier movies.
