The original Top Gun is unusual among Hollywood blockbusters for featuring no clear antagonist outside of Maverick’s own hubris, making him both the hero and villain of the story. Released in 1986, Top Gun is a classic from Revenge director and influential action helmer Tony Scott and an early star vehicle for Tom Cruise.
Soon to receive a long-awaited sequel in the form of Top Gun: Maverick, the original Top Gun is a simple, thrilling tale of a reckless test pilot with a need for speed and an insatiable desire to be the fastest, highest-flying, and riskiest in the business. The propulsive action movie turns this threadbare plot into a classic thanks to the cast’s chemistry and the thrilling flight sequences, but there’s no getting around the fact that Top Gun’s only villain is its hero.
As strange as it sounds for a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster, Top Gun is more concerned with the internal struggle of its protagonist than any external villains and their defeat. The reason the movie features no clear antagonist is due to the unstable political climate of its creation, with Top Gun being released in the mid-80s at the height of the Cold War. As a result, the filmmakers were reluctant to demonize any specific country and depict their combatants as anti-American, but in the process, the creators turned Top Gun into a more involving and emotionally resonant story than many blockbuster franchises can manage.
Top Gun Has No Clear Villains
Unlike most blockbusters, there is no clear villain in Top Gun, with the shady, barely-glimpsed foreign combatants of the finale not even having a nationality to their name. The planes were originally intended to be Russian, and they are vaguely alluded to being North Korean in the final film, but the unstable political climate of the mid-80s meant that the studio wasn't comfortable ascribing a particular nationality to these pilots. Top Gun may have been a stellar recruitment tool for the Navy's real-life Top Gun flight school but it wasn’t intended to be a jingoistic portrayal of the U.S. military succeeding over their foes so much as it was a deep dive into one man’s life journey. Top Gun, thanks to its lack of a clear antagonist, became a story of a man’s struggle with an obsession that drives his life, meaning the villains are internal demons, not external forces.
Top Gun Is About Maverick’s (Deadly) Drive
There are plenty of cinematic portrayals of obsession and its sometimes lethal consequences, from First Reformed to Foxcatcher. However, most of these movies steer clear of the blockbuster action genre as quietly introspective tales of characters fighting against their internal drive don’t usually make for riveting popcorn fare at the multiples. But in direct contradiction of this general formula, much like the later, darker Whiplash, Top Gun is a story of reckless obsession that eventually ends in tragedy. However, where Whiplash, which on the surface seems to be a much heavier film, at least stop shorts of any actual casualties, Goose’s death makes it clear that Maverick’s pursuit of perfection and rivalry with Iceman is actually a deadly affair.
Top Gun doesn’t shy away from depicting Maverick as the villain of his own story, as his hubris is as much a cause of Goose’s death as anyone else’s. It does stop short of vilifying him entirely, but the fact that Viper assures him there was nothing he could do doesn’t ameliorate Maverick’s guilt. He remains a character shaped by a death that he caused, however indirectly, and in the movie’s story, the clearest villain is his arrogance, rather than any enemy pilots.
Why Iceman Isn’t Top Gun’s Villain
Of course, the MiG-28s of the closing scenes aren't the only potential villains of Top Gun. At first glance, it seems easy to suggest that Val Kilmer’s Iceman is the villain of Top Gun, with the smug fellow pilot sharing the tough guy swagger of The Karate Kid’s baddie. Blond, tanned, and loud, Kilmer’s character seems to fit the bill of every jock villain seen in many 80s movies, particularly those that saw a character rise above the odds to beat a Johnny Lawrence or an Ivan Drago. But that’s not quite right either, as Iceman chews out Maverick for his risky flying and disregard for the safety of others, something that the character does need to be held accountable for. He’s far from a traditional villain and he has a point when he notes the danger Maverick put him and other pilots in, so much so that in another movie, Iceman would have as much claim to the main character role as Maverick, since both need to become more like each other over the movie’s runtime.
How This Affects The Top Gun Franchise
It’s good news for Top Gun: Maverick that the original Top Gun didn’t rely on external villains, as the more nebulous nature of America’s current military “threats” (China? IS? Iran?) mean there are no compelling geopolitical villains for the sequel, and drone warfare has rendered the prospect of high-flying dogfights far more anodyne and outdated. However, Maverick’s inner struggle is still an involving story, and if anything, the fact that the older test pilot has retained his legendary need for speed lends the sequel a tragic, dark element missing in the first film.
Top Gun: Maverick is all the more interesting for the fact that the film is missing an antagonist, as the sequel can now delve deep into how Goose’s early death affected Maverick’s life since the accident. The presence of Miles Teller’s Rooster makes it clear that Cruise’s character won’t be able to forget his past any time soon and, as the original Top Gun proves, Maverick has never had an enemy as hard to face and impossible to run from as himself. Top Gun's sequel could see Cruise on career-best form as the actor will have to access harder emotional depths than the escapist likes of Edge of Tomorrow and the Mission: Impossible series demand from him, and as a result, the finished film could be closer to an elegiac portrayal of an aging, flawed masculinity in the vein of The Wrestler or Unforgiven rather than the campy excesses of the original 80s cult classic.
- Top Gun: Maverick/Top Gun 2 (2021)Release date: Jul 02, 2021
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