The original Top Gun may have been a stellar recruitment tool for the real-life Navy and Air Force, but try as they might, the Army will never be able to recreate its impact with a version of their own for various reasons. Released in 1986, Top Gun was a huge hit at the box office. The high-flying drama won audience acclaim despite critical uncertainty and made a massive star of leading man Tom Cruise.

Top Gun, from the late action cinema legend Tony Scott, tells the tale of Maverick, a feckless test pilot with a “need for speed” who cares more about breaking records than working as part of a team. This simple story of a likable but flawed antihero learning to park his ego remains a cult classic, and Top Gun’s success led to a huge increase in real life Air Force and Navy enrollment rates. However, despite this, the Army has never been able to recreate the success of Top Gun with a movie depicting their institution in a similarly positive light—and they never will.

Related: Why Top Gun: Maverick Flopping Could Be Good For Tom Cruise

From the critically-disliked Act of Valor to the broadly-maligned zombie “comedy” Range 15,  a handful of attempts have been made at making military men into mainstream action heroes. However, none of these have ever come close to Top Gun’s success, due to the fact that the public are already too familiar with the workings of the military thanks to more critical depictions of the institution in hit movies over the decades. Now, hot off the modest success of last year’s Afghanistan war drama The Outpost, Rod Lurie’s upcoming West Pointer is being touted as a "Top Gun for the army" according to one military.com article. However, that’s an achievement not even the late, great Top Gun director Tony Scott could pull off for a variety of reasons.

Movie Fans Have Seen The Army’s Basic Training (& It’s Not Fun)

Forrest Gump Drill Sergeant

 

Much of Top Gun’s outsized success relied on the creators fudging the details of life in the Navy and Air Force, and often outright lying to an audience who weren’t familiar enough with the institution to spot a forgery. As Sean Burns’ excellent WBUR retrospective notes, Tony Scott was given access to real-life Navy classrooms but opted to shoot the lecture scenes in aircraft hangars for visual impact, while the screenwriters added a trophy competition and locker room to the real Navy training setup to reinforce the idea that basic training was essentially an extended sports movie montage. The biggest challenge Maverick faces is overcoming his own dark side, a story of self-improvement that looks nothing like what viewers associate with army training.

In contrast, viewers are all too familiar with basic training when it comes to the army. Everything from Forrest Gump to the underrated Tigerland has depicted the process as a gruelling, brutal experience. Even lighter fare like Stripes has struggled to make military training glamorous in the way that Top Gun managed to make the Navy seem cool. Audiences are too familiar with drill sergeants, 5 am wakeup calls, and muddy obstacle courses to believe in a shinier, summer blockbuster version of military training.

On The Ground (& Onscreen), War Is Hell

Platoon 1986 movie poster

Released in the mid-80s when American cinema was starting to reckon with the impact of the country’s actions in Vietnam, Top Gun benefitted from keeping its action (and as such, its politics) way up in the clouds. There’s a good reason the movie’s villains are never attributed to a particular country, with potential Top Gun director John Carpenter scornfully noting that the original script’s Russian dogfight climax would have prompted WWIII in reality. However, for much of Top Gun’s runtime, the fact that its cast are still in training, and more importantly miles in the sky, means there is no gritty, violent depictions of on-the-ground conflict. The grim reality of war is far harder to glamorize and idealize than Maverick’s airborne, seemingly victimless need for speed, and few viewers are likely to cheer on a hero for killing swathes of people the way they love to see Cruise’s hero pull off impressive aerobatic stuntwork.

Related: Every Actor Considered For Top Gun’s Maverick (And Why They Weren’t Cast)

While there is no denying action movie fans love seeing a tough hero gun down countless enemies, most hit movies that depict this need to create a dramatic power imbalance and turn the hero into a one-man army to make them worth rooting for. Even the latest Rambo movie turned its villains into drug dealers rather than an army, and more accurate war movies like Platoon tend to leave audiences devastated by the pitiless brutality of war. Obviously enough, an audience horrified by the human cost of warfare are unlikely to sign up for the army as they leave the theatre. However, viewers enthralled by Maverick’s antics literally did just that for the Air Force and Navy during the movie’s run in theatres.

Top Gun Is One Man’s Story

Tom Cruise as Maverick in Top Gun

Maverick may learn to play as part of a team, but the movie is his story and his story alone, something which would be far harder to pull off in the context of the military. The entire purpose of basic training is to unlearn individualism and see oneself as part of a larger unit, meaning a Maverick-style antihero would be a problem, rather than an asset, regardless of his skills. The same is arguably true of the Navy, and Iceman’s beef with Maverick is understandable given the character’s apparent inability to share the spotlight even at the cost of his co-worker’s lives. However, a test pilot is a very different role from an infantryman, and the former has more room to centre himself as the hero of his own story. A movie depicting an army man disregarding orders and going with his heart, in contrast, is likely to look less heroic than Top Gun and more merely ill-advised and potentially fatal, as Tom Cruise proved in his earlier role in the darker drama Taps.

More: Every Tom Cruise Movie Where His Character Dies

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