Does not age well

Pacing is SLOW???!!!

Times change, people change, cultures change and Kenny Loggins is no longer as awesome as he used to be in our eyes, unfortunately... I think we are more jaded as a culture and expect everything delivered immediately as instant gratification, so everything has been done before, 'new' things are just a twist on the old, and anything that takes a moment is 'boring'...

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I was born in the 80's so I still had G.I. Joe and Transformers when this was popular and couldn't really give much craps about live action "grown-up" films. This one has been on my back-burner for years and I finally watched it yesterday now that it's on Netflix. After calling my mother and discussing it with her, she admitted that, yeah. It was a good movie when it came out, but doesn't hold up as well today.

I'm not even sure what I disliked about the film. It might have been the pacing, a lot of time is spent with nothing really major happening in between very short spurts of something happening. It may have that some of the character development felt really forced. It may have been the phoned in romance subplot. Something tells me that if I had watched this back when it was big, I would have been incredibly into it, but watching it yesterday, I was just kinda bored. To it's credit though, even when I would pause to go pee or have a cigarette, I kept coming back to see the next part of the story, so the basics are still engaging.

I did like the development of the Iceman subplot. That was well handled and moved along believably, especially since the two characters still didn't completely like each other by the end of the film.

Nah, this movie is just as good today as it was years ago. They simply dont make 'em like they used too!

I was in my 20's and took a girl on a first date to see this cuz she was into Tom Cruise and it was already a big hit and all.
She loved it, of course.
I had to keep myself from either gagging or laughing at it. I thought it was stupid then and is even more ridiculous now.
And if it came out today, it would pass as a parody. maybe.

No doubt this "doesn't age well" in a sense . . but I prefer just to think of itself as prime 80's cheese, a genre that didn't really define itself until around the turn of the century. That's not even an insult, really. Every decade has well-known films that play better than others down the road.

I watched Sudden Impact last night and was hit by a massive wave of 80's cheese, especially the music. The music is often the aspect of a movie that dates it the most. Think of Star Wars. I have no idea if you're a fan, but John Williams's score will sound epic for a long, long time. Can you imagine if George Lucas had opted for a self-consciously "spacey" sounding score, full of cheap-sounding techno?

So, Top Gun is both giggle-inducing and awesome at the same time. I watch it ever few years with no regrets, and I bought the 3D version a couple of years ago. It is what it is, unpretentiously and almost innocently.

It also makes me a little wistful for Val Kilmer's prime. I happened to watch Tombstone earlier today, which is probably what got me to take a look at Top Gun on IMDB. He was one of those guys you figured would always be a star, but nope.

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I have meddled with the primal forces of nature and I will atone.

I was in 8th grade when I first saw this movie on VHS (1988). I was well aware of all the hype that had surrounded it in '86; there were even kids at school that had cheesy "Top Gun" jackets and even cheesier "Top Gun" sneakers - https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f1/56/8f/f1568fefc0f9c1310af9fc5a6451c822.jpg. But I was never interested in seeing the movie. Airplanes never interested me all that much, and Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer looked like douchebags to me.

In any case, we got a VCR in '88 and my friends and I started renting a lot of movies, and for whatever reason, they wanted to rent Top Gun. As I expected, I didn't care for it, and couldn't see what all the hype was about. I just watched it again tonight, for the first time since I was a kid, and it's even worse than I remember. It's one of the cheesiest, most cringeworthy movie I've ever seen. Why is everyone drenched with sweat in so many scenes, including scenes where it doesn't make sense? Why does Tom Cruise keep grinning at everyone? Why did we have to see and hear that horrible, cringe-inducing singing from them, twice, no less? Why did they play that Kenny Loggins song at least three times?

To make matters worse, the Blu-ray transfer sucked; way too much DNR, plus visible compression artifacts, plus it was too dark.

Dreadful 80s cheese