Top Gun: Maverick will soon reveal the fate of Tom Cruise's titular daredevil, but has the original Top Gun's best song already given away his eventual end? A huge success upon release in 1986, Tony Scott's action drama Top Gun is a high-flying thrill ride that follows Tom Cruise's overconfident aviator as he chases romance, camaraderie among his fellow cadets, and most pointedly, speed. Although the film features a requisite love interest and some superb chemistry between Cruise and his fellow recruits, it's mostly focused on Maverick's relationship with his skill as a pilot.
The character is obsessed with being the best and the fastest throughout the movie, constantly in competition with himself and others. The film's upcoming long-awaited sequel will see Maverick reckon with his past, but the first film in the series might have already hinted at how the hero's saga will inevitably end. A close look at the original Top Gun's soundtrack may be the key to finding out the eventual fate of Tom Cruise's cocksure pilot and, like a lot of stories about obsession and the drive to succeed, it's not a happy conclusion that Top Gun: Maverick's story seems to be heading toward.
The film's soundtrack was almost as much of a blockbuster success as Top Gun itself, a feat that few think Top Gun Maverick's soundtrack will be able to top. The film even won its lone Oscar for Berlin's classic ballad 'Take My Breath Away', but interestingly it's a more bombastic and even more well-remembered contribution to the Top Gun's soundtrack that outlines the hero's eventual fate. That's right, it's Sterling Archer's favorite song, Kenny Loggins' 'Danger Zone'.
The lyrics seem to celebrate Maverick's love of risky stunts, but they could also allude to a dark ending for the character in Top Gun: Maverick. A close look at 'Danger Zone' illustrates that there's no way Tom Cruise's Maverick will ever give up his adrenaline rush, which explains why he's never been promoted to a desk job, a position typically afforded to someone of his seniority. Instead Maverick stays in the high-risk end of service, and this self-destructive drive is likely to be part of what led to the eventual dissolution of Maverick and Charlie's relationship in the time since the events of the original film.
As illustrated by the foreboding lyrics, Maverick needs to be a "flyboy" because he thinks that all of his personal and professional validation can only come from pushing limits and breaking boundaries. In Maverick's mind, this is the only way people will value him:
"They never say hello to you, Until you get it on the red line overload, you'll never know what you can do, Until you get it up as high as you can go"
This unshakeable love of risk could come from any number of sources, with the most obvious in-story justification being Maverick's unprocessed guilt over Goose's death in the original film. To use an old Psychology 101 cliche, it can be argued that Maverick's need for speed comes from trying to outrun his demons (even though Goose's untimely death was arguably as much Iceman's fault as it was Maverick's).
As with any escalating addiction, there's only one tragic way for this impulse to reach its logical conclusion. The idea that Top Gun: Maverick will kill off its main character via this unrelenting drive seems surprising given how much his love of stunts seems influenced by his real-life actor. But it's further illustrated later in the song as Loggins talks about climbing closer to the edge, aware of the danger and uncaring, for the sake of an adrenaline-fuelled rush:
"Out along the edge is always where I burn to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity"
Hopefully, Cruise's hero can survive the events of Top Gun: Maverick despite what Loggins' song implies, but this reading reinforces the idea that the story of Maverick's obsessive drive will end the same way as Tony Stark's, with the character dying as himself, inspiring a new generation to follow in his footsteps but losing his life in the process. It's hard to deny that the lyrics seem to spell out only one possible ending to the cocky flyboy's story, but only time will tell whether Maverick can pull out of his self-destructive tailspin before the end of Top Gun: Maverick and survive to play a mentor role in Top Gun 3. But it certainly seems the first film's soundtrack has alluded to his inevitable crash-and-burn end in no uncertain terms.
