A Year in Film: 1986
Top Gun. It’s getting a sequel. About 40 years later, with a much older Tom Cruise. This is ridiculous, the first movie isn’t all that great. It’s about an army pilot. There’s a volleyball scene, and a great quote, but that’s about it.
However, it’s a legitimate star vehicle for Cruise. He was involved in the scriptwriting, and said that his character here was the only one he’d played so far in his career that could be described as ‘larger than life.’
Maverick is. Definitely. He’s such an aggressive individual, and the volleyball scene is, in addition to having some other… redeeming qualities…
a great moment of 80s montage, a good way to establish Maverick as a performative alpha, and also a good way to get to know the personalities of each character in a microcosm of how they are portrayed throughout the movie, both preceding and following this scene. It’s a central keystone of the structure of the thing. It’s also a central keystone of…
Sorry got distracted.
Top Gun is a bit of a weird movie for being so 80s iconic. There’s no central supernatural twist to the story. It’s just about pilots and machismo. But sometimes that’s all you need to create iconography. That and Val Kilmer. And, again, Tom Cruise. And also, Tim Robbins, who’s in this somehow. That’s a really expensive cast, if they’re all in their primes. Val Kilmer was Batman, for crying out loud!
But yeah, there’s no twist. If Spielberg had directed this movie, Maverick would have gone back in time to the 17th century and flown a plane with pirates. That would have been a much better movie, actually. And speaking of alternate directors that could have worked on this thing, John Carpenter was considered!
I don’t know if that would have been better or worse, but it certainly would have been a much different experience! Carpenter usually composes all of his stuff, so there wouldn’t have been the Faltermeyer score that made the movie slightly more iconic than it would have been already.
It also would have had a much different tone. The key scene in the movie (not volleyball) would have been so changed. Rather than a stepping stone in an action-comedy, it would have been the central focal point of Maverick’s character.
The whole thing also might have been a horror movie? Although Carpenter has proven his capability with dumb action before in They Live!, that movie was released after this one, so it’s possible the tone might not have changed much at all. Carpenter’s signature style wasn’t super established at this point in his career.
However, another director was considered. Would have made the movie so much differently, and probably would have indulged in his vices so much that the movie would have been rated R.
David Cronenberg.
The grandmaster of gore. The conductor of so much blood you might puke. Constructor of surreal, disgusting body horror. Cronenberg would have gone ham and Top Gun would have been a gross pilot-body-horror-adjacent movie starring Tom Cruise.
David Cronenberg declined, probably because he was busy making his gross-out masterpiece with Jeff Goldblum.
Ah, The Fly. What can be said about The Fly that hasn’t already been said by countless other people, and also better.
This movie is the kind that makes you almost vomit.
This movie is the kind that makes you question your own humanity.
This movie has incredible practical effects.
This movie really sucks to watch while eating something.
This movie is so Cronenberg it’s almost offensive.
This movie was rewritten by Cronenberg to make it so Cronenberg it’s almost offensive.
This movie plays with the themes of identity, and what it means to truly know a person.
Of course, it doesn’t do that subtly, because the ‘hidden secret’ that the main character possesses is that he’s turning into a giant fly monster slowly but surely. If any of your friends had that secret, you’d know.
It’s a slick, 96-minute, gross-out flick. But it has just a little more to say than ‘boogedy boogedy boogedy here’s a puke fest.’ It parallels Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis book in more ways than one. Goldblum’s character, Seth Brundle, doesn’t understand what’s happening to him.
He simply wakes up a different thing than he was previously. The only difference is that it keeps happening, consecutively worse each time. He has a Bateman-like downward spiral. The difference between this version of the script and the first draft is that 2/3rds of the way through the original, Brundle loses the ability to speak.
Here, however, he is articulate for as long as possible. Able to hatch demented schemes as a reaction to his condition. Able to construct deformed fantasies in his slowly deforming flesh prison. Able to covet a child he knows nothing about. He’s able to lament, charm and threaten.
He’s a person, but he has issues. He’s losing his humanity, but becoming stronger, faster, more driven. Until he isn’t. Then he’s just inhuman. Testing his trauma on anyone who will listen. Jealousy runs rampant, and envy kills.
Welcome to a nightmare.
Hey speaking of nightmares, remember Alien?
There’s more of them now! Absolutely stellar stuff here. The sequel is called Aliens. Nice. Because. There’s more of them this time. Get it? It astonishes me that this movie isn’t pure horror. There’s action elements. There’s comedy. Why?
You’ve established, in the first movie, that one Alien is a terrifying force of nature. Nigh unstoppable. Murdered a giant designed by H.R. Giger and used it to incubate its children. The only survivor of that incubation batch threw a well-oiled crew into disarray, and killed all but one of them.
So now? There’s several of those killing machines. And they’re all out to get a similarly sized force of people. With similar well-oiled chemistry. This isn’t going to go very well for those people, I don’t think. This movie excels at one thing in particular, and that is the art of the call-back.
Every time Ripley comes into contact with something related to her traumas in the first movie, whether that be the concept of the alien, or Bishop’s status as a synthetic being, she is reactionary and twitchy. She’s had bad experiences with those two things before, and it truly carries over into her interactions with them in this.
Another thing that this movie excels at is chemistry. The last scene filmed was the first scene where all the characters are introduced, as the actors had been working together for months beforehand, and natural rapport cropped up over that time.
You start to really care for these people, and then they are all ripped away from you by a teeming mass of teeth, limbs and other bitey, cutting blades and poking tools. With acid blood. And a prehensile second mouth.
James Cameron directed this. He brings a sense of epic action to the fight scenes. Whereas its predecessor was a tight, contained thriller, the successor, the heir to the throne, as it were, is a bombastic, rollicking action thriller.
There are gunfights, mechfights, fights of all kinds. There’s an incredibly cathartic and incineratingly blistering and impactful punch-out between two Queens of cinema. One of them is Sigourney Weaver, and one of them is a huge alien monster.
It rocks.
And rolls.
And twists and shouts.
Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? Bueller?
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is another enigma of iconography. However, its immediate success and ingraining in the cultural zeitgeist is a lot more explainable than Top Gun’s is. One, it’s funny. Like really funny.
Ferris’ whole plan is absurd. He uses the technology of the time to convince everyone that matters that he’s debilitatingly ill. He plays the clarinet really badly. He takes the most stressful break from school imaginable, by choosing to go see every single one of Chicago’s major tourist sites in one day.
Perhaps it’s geographically impossible, but who really cares about that when you have Matthew Broderick cracking wise for an hour and forty-three minutes.
Two, it takes place in an immediately recognizable location. The Nightmare on Elm Street/Ghostbusters protocol works wonders here. The museum they go to in Chicago has several visitors who simply want to do the Funny Pose™ from the movie in front of that one painting.
Three, it’s just so fun. So is Top Gun, but Ferris Bueller is a lot less heavy. It’s one of those typical pieces of 80s fluff, but it’s so much more impactful, culturally, than that fluff usually is.
I don’t quite have the answer for you. Of course, it’s really good, but I also can’t quite explain why, specifically, it is that way.
Maybe the unexplainable is part of what makes the 80s the 80s. It’s a decade of fairy tales and bedtime stories that form foundations and support beams for nearly all of the film landscape today.
And how about those bedtime stories?