Pauline Kael

But technique, which counts for so much when a picture doesn’t have it, counts for very little when it’s all a picture has.

In Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert tortures himself with images of his nymphet in the arms of “kissy-faced brutes”; that’s what Top Gun is full of. When McGillis is offscreen, the movie is a shiny homoerotic commercial featuring the elite fighter pilots in training at San Diego’s Miramar Naval Air Station. […] What is this commercial selling? It’s just selling, because that’s what the producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and the director, Tony (Make It Glow) Scott, know how to do. Selling is what they think moviemaking is about. The result is a new “art” form: the self-referential commercial. Top Gun is a recruiting poster that isn’t concerned with recruiting, but with being a poster.

At the end, Schwarzenegger makes his ritual preparations for the climactic showdown, decking himself out in leather, packing up an arsenal of guns, and, as he leaves his apartment, copping a quick look of satisfaction in the mirror. It’s his only love scene.

The profanity, which is an extension of adolescent humor, is central to the idea of the movie. The silliness of adolescents — compulsively making jokes, seeing the ridiculous in everything — is what makes sanity possible here. The doctor who rejects adolescent behavior flips out. Adolescent pride in skills and games — in mixing a Martini or in devising a fishing lure or in golfing—keeps the men from becoming maniacs. Sutherland and Gould, and Tom Skerritt, as a third surgeon, and a lot of freakishly talented new-to-movies actors are relaxed and loose in their roles. Their style of acting underscores the point of the picture, which is that people who aren’t hung up by pretensions, people who are loose and profane and have some empathy – people who can joke about anything — can function, and maybe even do something useful, in what may appear to be insane circumstances.