In light of the recent passing of Tony Scott, which should remind us all that depression is an awful disease that sometimes has no correlation with perceived public success, I've started thinking about his career. The only Tony Scott movie I had actually seen was Top Gun, undoubtedly his biggest success. Top Gun loomed large in my brother's childhood and by extension mine. By our estimation, my brother had watched it over thirty times between the years of 1995-1999. His room was plastered with F-14 Tomcat posters. We attended an air show. Dylan dreamed of being a pilot until the arrival of myopia in 9th grade. The soundtrack was a daily staple of carpool.
The legacy Top Gun was examined back in 2011 in the GQ article "The Day the Movies Died" by Mark Harris. In it, Top Gun essentially gets blamed for destroying the auteur movie experience as we know it. It heralded the dawn of the blockbuster or "brand film". This provides for a compelling thesis, but I think a fairer assessment is that Top Gun was an inflection point for a trend already in motion: the rise of high concept films that could be reduced to a simple marketing soundbyte.
