Top Gun
Overview
Some pilots follow orders. Maverick rewrites them at 500 miles an hour. Tom Cruise plays Lt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, a naval aviator with all the talent in the world and none of the discipline, who gets sent to Top Gun, the Navy's elite fighter weapons school, where the best of the best are separated from everyone else. Waiting for him there is Iceman (Val Kilmer), his ice-cold rival who flies by the book and can't stand everything Maverick represents, plus Charlie (Kelly McGillis), the instructor he falls for — who also happens to grade him. The rivalry in the classroom is almost as good as the action in the sky, because the aerial dogfights here are the real deal: real jets, real speed, and a soundtrack so iconic it practically has its own fan base. But underneath the swagger, this is a story about a guy whose confidence is his greatest weapon and his biggest flaw, and about what happens when showing off stops being enough. Few movies have ever made anything look this cool, and fewer still have stayed this quotable for this long.
