The pair eject, but Goose hits the jettisoned canopy of the aircraft, and the impact kills him. Maverick isn’t to blame but nonetheless feels responsible. The loss chastens him just enough to take the edge off his insubordinate recklessness.

We all know that the best thing about Top Gun continues to be those incredible, pulse-pounding in-flight sequences and gorgeous orange-hued shots of crew and grounded planes at the base and on aircraft carriers. Scott shot most of the air footage from a Learjet, augmented by mounted cameras inside the F-14 cockpits and exteriors. That’s why he shot the whole thing in Super-8: The larger anamorphic lenses wouldn’t fit in the cockpits. The US Navy supplied aircraft, carriers, and crews, and the flight deck footage captured normal operations, with nothing staged.

The stunt pilots included future NASA astronaut Scott Altman, who performed the aforementioned infamous “flipping the bird” maneuver and the tower-buzzing moments. There was one casualty: aerobatic pilot Art Scholl, who performed a lot of the in-flight camera work. Scholl fell afoul of the flat spin maneuver; he couldn’t recover and crashed his biplane into the Pacific Ocean near Carlsbad, California. Neither his body nor the plane was ever recovered, but Scott dedicated the film to Scholl.

From rebel to hero

The film’s weaknesses are… well, almost everything else.

Confession: I’ve never been a huge Cruise fan, particularly in his early career. He didn’t really come into his own until much later; Tropic Thunder, Minority Report, Edge of Tomorrow, and Magnolia are my favorite of his roles, and he acquitted himself admirably in the excellent Top Gun: Maverick.

I still find his performance in the original abrasive and insincere. It takes skill as an actor to make a character like Maverick genuinely likable, and Cruise was not at that level yet in the mid-’80s, coasting on his boyish good looks instead. The film tries to include some vulnerable moments to show the sensitive soul lurking behind the swagger, mostly in scenes with Charlie, but it’s a shallow sentimentality and not very effective. The uninspired dialogue doesn’t help.