In the Danger Zone: A Review of Top Gun
Top Gun is based around the best fighter pilots of the Top Gun Naval Fighter Weapons School. Tom Cruise’s character Maverick vie for rivalry and romance with other pilots with a personal demons to battle with.
Top Gun is a military propaganda based movie visualizing competition, heroism, and transformation of character in the backdrop of macho male lead characters. It has an aggressive action vibration, but at the same maritime has a sad note of personal issues, as of Maverick himself, who fights with the external and internal enemy.
Tom Cruise plays Maverick with charm, concluding the experience of a brave, yet troubled pilot. Creating the colead character of Iceman, Val Kilmer offers perfect opposition hence becomes a foil to Tom Cruise;Kelly McGillis’s Charlotte also adds a romantic foil to the film.
Tony Scott as the director of Top Gun creates the set and highly energised and visually impressive action sequences. He manages to direct the pacing and the staking effectively so that a viewer can stay hooked even if there are clichéd scenes.
The music: the movie features one of the best movie soundtracks, starting with Kenny Loggins’ ‘Danger Zone.’ Such aspects as memorable music accompanying both the brilliant air battles and two emotional film’s centers, let alone the magnificent cinematography that provides viewers with spectacular outlook at the impressive performance of the fighter jets. The take offs, the huge flight school and the fighter jets evoke emotions in addition to making significant contribution to the feeling of adrenalin that the movie exudes.
Due to the masterful production of the system the actual locations such as the flight school and the aircraft carriers of the U.S. Navy are depicted. The concepts of sets and costumes also reflect thejaunty tone of the movie especially when it captures the life of a military.
There is a great use of special effects especially during the screen inflation that depicts the thriller of the story such as in Top Gun on the scenes where the planes actually stage a dogfight. For practical consequences and shooting inside the airplane create believability to the thrilling flight battles.
Cutting in Top Gun is clean, not letting the movie be slow and matching the energetic flights scenes. The shift from action to drama and back to action is spectacular and uninterrupted.
The movie has a pace because the action is coupled with some drama. The pace sometimes slows down during some scenes, but it quickly gains it back again.
The dialogue in Top Gun is very precise, thus a good character build up while at the same time giving the feel of military language. Though the scenes with Iceman vs Maverick were very good the movie uses cliches a lot. For instance, the aspect of conflict within Maverick could have been dealt with in more detail.
Top Gunn is quite an entertaining movie as it combines exciting and dramatic sequences of action with profound interpersonal conflict. The movie makes the shocking impact of the high-stake action and exciting performances, as well as introducing the all-conquering tune. But again despite coming with slight narrative predictability, the movie has aged into becoming a classic.
