“Top Gun should be like Apocalypse Now,” Tony Scott said in a making-of featurette. “It should be in the bowels of an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean and dark and sort of unforgiving.” This was Scott’s original vision when the Hollywood project about hot shot naval aviators was first brought to him. He didn’t see what Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer were looking for initially: the glossy, sweaty, 110-minute F-14 ad filled seeping with homoeroticism and 1980s bops. That psychological nightmare out on the seas—deep within the heart of a machine, no windows: just byzantine corridors of metal and colored lights—stuck with Scott for the better part of a decade, as in 1995 it would seem that Simpson and Bruckheimer finally let him realize it.
Starring a heavyweight sparring pair of Gene Hackman stern, wrongheaded Captain Frank Ramsey and Denzel Washington as the philosophical and precise XO Ron Hunter, Crimson Tide is a boxing match of acting talent, where neither Hackman or Washington hold back any blows—Hackman unleashing his sneering confidence, and Washington attempting to keep calm while displaying an unfettered swagger. The stakes are simple: Russian ultranationalists have seceded from the Federation, seizing control of territory and nuclear weapons, and the US is deploying preemptive strike forces in the Pacific. The titular Crimson Tide gets orders to fire, confirmed by all those in command. But another message comes in right as their radio communications are severed. A partial communique, inconclusive: it could be an affirmation of what they’ve already been told to do, or it could be an order to stand down. They just don’t know, as Denzel argues, but they’ve already gotten their orders, Hackman responds. They’re at a bureaucratic impasse on the brink of WW3. Hackman: “God help you if you're wrong.” Denzel: “If I'm wrong, then we're at war; God help us all.”
It’s the kind of movie they don’t make anymore because they can’t. It’s not just because the mid-budget thriller has largely been driven to extinction by tentpoles and a sub-100-film-a-year producing Hollywood, but because there would be no one to see it. The latter point informs the former: cinema has become an increasingly irrelevant medium in pop culture, and its decline as a mainstay has fed into a crisis in raising new talent with the cultural pull that previous star machines have had.
Take, for instance, Top Gun: Maverick (2022), which tries to ostensibly act both as a star-making vehicle for young up-and-comers (Glen Powell) and those that never hit it quite as big as people expected (Miles Teller) while also being a send-off for the aging Tom Cruise. It’s a baton-passing at a glance. But underneath the hood, it’s the opposite. Maverick is a total refusal of the new; it’s haunted by and chooses to live among its ghosts (need I mention the scene where “Great Balls of Fire” lurches up at him like a memory from his deepest recesses?). “The end is inevitable, Maverick. Your kind is headed for extinction,” an admiral tells him. Cruise stands in profile at the door, “Maybe so, sir. But not today.” It’s a rousing moment, telling us times haven’t changed, we don’t need to worry, we won’t die. And it’s a lie. Not in the diegesis of the film—there, Cruise is immortal. Even when his plane goes down and the new generation is ready to take his place, he’s resurrected in a heist for one of his old F-14 to take on the shadowy “fifth generation fighters” (clearly modeled the Russian Sukhoi Su-57, probably the only military jet project in the world who can beat the overspending, failure, and fraudulence of the American F-35) which are deployed by a shadowy, nuclear-arming enemy. They’re not a clear Soviet (or post-Soviet) stand-in like in the original Top Gun, the enemy here is a rogue state, perhaps North Korea, but more likely Iran. It doesn’t matter apparently, but the hyper-specificity of the mission does. Every piece is mapped out, tracked, and repeated for the utmost clarity for audiences.
If there’s one sin Maverick sees in Top Gun, it’s its opacity from being a cobbled-together nature. The dogfighting is ridiculous, the fighter controls are nonsensical, and the geography of the aerial combat is often completely incoherent. Maverick is the opposite, everything is meticulously rendered with the help of military consultants and Northrup Grumman employees. Many have accused the original Top Gun of being propaganda to boost recruitment numbers, but that’s incidental compared to the intentional fetishism of military equipment in Maverick. The movie serves the machines, not the other way around. Say what you will about Tony Scott, but his advertising abilities were almost always put to use to service what’s human on screen.
Audiences now are only half there for Cruise and his aging body that the camera quickly cuts away from in the beach sports scene. They are really getting out of their houses and back in the theaters because it’s big, loud, visceral. It’s a theme park ride, part of the same plague within contemporary film that Martin Scorsese received so much flak for identifying this quality within Marvel. And because of that it’s really not possible for the scene in Maverick paying homage to the sweat-soaked, way too sexy for no logical reason, completely iconic beach volleyball scene from Top Gun, to be anything but an “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny” moment. If it could’ve been like how the movies were 40 years ago, maybe it could’ve made some stars out of the false-start careers of its youngsters. They’re just empty faces and diet specimens.
When we see Denzel we know we’re on his side. When we see Hackman, we know we’re not. These men aren’t just of a certain caliber of actor (one that either they don’t manufacture anymore, or no one is willing to use), but ones who’ve classically developed personas that do a lot of the immediate heavy-lifting for audience expectations. It makes the moral ambiguity of the script and its tete-a-tete battle of military bureaucracy simple—there’s a good guy and a bad guy, and the tension is that both have a point, and the fun is in watching them try to one each other both as characters and as actors. And they’re packed with character actors like sardines: Matt Craven, George Dzundza, Viggo Mortensen, James Gandolfini, Steve Zahn. It’s a film from a “healthy” industry, or at least one where every piece of its machination could still pretend to be running like a well-managed factory. It’s too sporadic, too vaguely freelance, too un-lucrative for the gifted journeymen to have a movie made of professionals at every level that still can hold onto that creative spark. It’s thrilling, and tragic to realize that the industry that made this, as flawed as it was, is long gone, and won’t be coming back.