It’s been a number of years since I watched this blockbuster movie, Top Gun (starring Tom Cruise), about a crack team of F-14 US fighter pilots “protecting democracy” from her enemies via air-to-air combat. So some of the details may have gotten a little fuzzy in my aged mind.

For example, did you know that it was actually Nicolas Cage (not the scientologist Tom Cruise) who starred as Jake Preston, the cocky, ace pilot tasked with training to conduct a near-impossible mission to disrupt the evil drug cartels of South America (the entire continent)?

And for some reason, I remember fighter jets, but, no, memory is a fiction; it was actually Apache helicopters that were used to protect our freedoms from the air. The mind plays tricks on you. For example, I turned Tommy Lee Jones (as Brad Little) into Tom Skerritt (as Viper) the esteemed veteran teacher-pilot who brings Jake under his wing to show him his weaknesses and bring about his true potential. The wing-man character I remembered as Goose, was actually called Breaker (weird how I got those two confused) and Val Kilmer (whom I creatively imagined as Iceman) evidently wasn’t even in the movie.

I don’t really know how I recreated all these events and named my fictional film Top Gun since the name of the movie I watched was Fire Birds (1990), but when you get old you remember things differently.

Ok, April Fool’s prank over!

But to be honest, Fire Birds was a complete knock-off of Top Gun and so similar it would be easy to get the two confused.

Disclaimers first: Call me un-American or unpatriotic, if you will, but I actually don’t like Top Gun because I believe it’s a massively over-rated propaganda movie (with one of my least favorite actors, Tommy-boy) and franchise. So, for me, the fact that Nicolas Cage starred in this obvious knock-off of a well-beloved movie four years after its release, is both embarrassing and kind of funny / awesome.

I am sure, back then, like most 13 year olds at the time, I was enamored with the original release of Top Gun (and its Kenny Loggins fueled soundtrack Highway to the Danger Zone) in the same way that I voraciously consumed episodes of The A-Team, but watching these shows as an adult, just makes me roll my eyes and shake my head. I’ll unpack some of the reasons why I find this genre boring, formulaic caveman shit, but just wanted to be forthcoming with my disdain. To gut-check myself with this, I went ahead and watched Top Gun: Maverick (after watching Fire Birds: hadn’t seen it) just so I’d have a modern point of reference; to see if my bias against this genre had to do with maybe movie conventions of the day, lack of compelling storyline, politics or some other reason, other than the movie itself. I think not. But let’s get into it.

Fire Birds Summary

With Fire Birds and Top Gun: Maverick (and really every movie I’ve seen in this genre) the plot is always the same: centered on some military threat to the U.S. that must be solved via air combat. These military conflicts usually don’t take place over American soil (or by direct threat to American lives) but in some other country that we are sticking our nose in, with some loose (but dangerous!) correlation to American “security”.

For example, in Fire Birds, the U.S. military was fighting the “war on drugs” quite literally by taking on the cartels in South America, whose air / forces were being protected by helicopter mercenary, The Scorpion aka Eric Stoller. (In Maverick, the mission was against an unnamed “colder climate” country that was looking to produce massive amounts of uranium.)

To meet the “threat” the U.S. military brings together its best pilots to be trained for the mission. The mission usually involves a select smaller number of pilots who are the “top of the class” but who must learn some new techniques or to hone their skills (in a short time frame) to meet the certain-death-danger criteria of the mission through the tutelage of some aging grand wizard of air combat.

There’s usually two cocky pilots competing with each other and a bunch of other side character pilots with nicknames like “Payback” “Cyclone” “Phoenix” or “Snake Eyes” watching them from the grandstands. The plot follows this pattern: people saying it can’t be done, it can’t be done, it can’t be done; star pilot does something rash that amazes them; someone usually dies bringing gravity to the situation; star pilot gains some humility and overcomes Achilles heel; the mission timeline gets moved up (or some important assumption about the mission is deadly WRONG); the mission seems more dangerous, and like it can’t be done again; the team comes together (in often selfless ways) and eventually is victorious over the enemy, miracle achieved.

Voila. There’s the plot to every American military air combat movie ever.

My pet peeve’s with these movies

If you’re here for the Cage talk, you can move on to the next section. I just wanted to explain some of my pet peeves with these types of movies that obviously colors my views.

• America always has the unquestioned moral high ground. These movies never seem to call into question whether or not we (America) should even be blowing other country’s aircraft to smithereens, or taking part in these missions in the first place. It’s a given that what America does is justified and our military might should not be diminished (for any greater good). But if you are student of history (or current events) you have to at least acknowledge many, many political mistakes (and sins) committed by the American military / political system both domestically and internationally. I was hoping Maverick might touch upon this nuance even just a little bit, but nope, it does not. As long as we’re the country holding all the nukes (and producing the uranium for them) that’s OK, but not when it’s other countries doing it.
• The blatant, unapologetic propaganda and rewriting of history. Fire Birds has a great example of this. The movie plot is based on the Reagan / Bush era “war on drugs” that was aided through military intervention. Newscasts from the movie show police confiscating truckloads of cocaine and raiding the homes of mostly (visibly) white American drug users. A more critical (and I’d argue realistic) view of the history of the war on drugs paints a different picture of the “drug epidemic” that was much more racially and politically motivated and lead to the incarceration of literally millions of black Americans. Different history, different fight.
• Tom Cruise. Ok, so he wasn’t in Fire Birds, but he was in both Top Gun movies and the guy is just a short little man with a very big ego. Evidently, we didn’t have a lot of good casting options for American heroes in the 1980s. I digress.
• Alpha-male pissing contests. I know I’m probably sounding more and more “woke mob” / intellectual elite the more I say in this post, but I’ve always been a little leery of the “let’s see who has the bigger schlong” tone of these type of movies. Guys proving how tough, smart, fast, virile, alpha, testosteroned they are over and over again. Begs the question: who are you trying to convince? (“I’ve got a need. A need for speed.” Puh-lease.)

• Dogfight cinematography. I’ll admit that Maverick had some of the best cinematography I’ve seen, and the action was a little easier to follow than the norm, but for the most part the action sequences in Fire Birds and the original Top Gun are frenetic, disjointed, and hard to follow. I think in the pre-drone shooting of Fire Birds, it may have employed the same aerial footage of the terrain on a loop (it felt that way to me.) The scenes aren’t framed in a broad enough view to see where the planes are coming from and going to. It’s hard to know which pilots are which and how they are evading or making the “kill” shots against their enemies. I know putting the focus on the cockpits places the viewer in the proverbial “pilot seat” and gives you a sense for what real life combat probably feels like, but it makes my head spin and I tune out after a while.
• Dude’s singing in bars. This is mostly a Top Gun thing, but it’s complete bullshit in my experience. When was the last time you saw guys (straight, white hetero-males) singing in a non-karaoke bar like this. Is this an Air Force thing I am unaware of? While I think this type of pub singing happens in the UK (with soccer hooligans) and probably other European countries, I am less convinced it happens like this in the U.S. especially in the military establishment (and most especially with popular songs from the 50s/60s) Nope. Didn’t happen. Doesn’t happen. Won’t happen. Hollywood is just being hollywood here. Silly.

The World According to Jake Preston

He’s a real American hero. If you’re not a skeptic like me and you buy into the propaganda of American exceptionalism then you’ll appreciate Jake’s character as a heroic helicopter pilot trying to defend his brother-in-arms and the American people at large. In front a panel of military decision makers, he defends his fallen patriots who have died at the hands of the enemy, “The cartel has them outpaid, outmanned, and outgunned. Knowing that they still went in. They didn’t stand a chance. They still went in. They’re heroes and they should be avenged.” When a special task force is formed to eliminate the cartel, Jake is one of the first to enlist in the effort. “You can count me in, sir!”

True to many of Cage’s roles, Jake is cock-sure of himself; he’s a brash, smack-talking, chauvinist of a guy who pairs nicely with the equally confident and smooth-talking Brad Little (Jones). Little, whose job is to teach Preston and the other top pilots how to complete this mission “to seek out and confront the forces of evil and kill’em deader ‘n hell!” (his words) is not quite ready to retire to academia and wants to be the flight leader on this mission, but is being “put to pasture” by his leaders in favor of the younger pilots.

Jones talks a mile a minute in his southern cowboy lilt and always finds a way to stress how hard the task ahead will be with lines like, “The clock is running folks, and it’s running fast.” Or “You’re going to be as busy as a three-peckered goat.” (I don’t really understand that metaphor but I guess it’s pretty busy.)

He’s in love with a girl who doesn’t seem very in love with him.

We’ve discussed this before, but Cage (as Preston) tends to be a bit stalkerish in his love pursuits in a way that makes me uncomfortable. I know (again) this relational dynamic is/was a product of the times and a lot of movies featured men chasing women. The guy pursuing the “playing hard to get” female or the “she says no, but means yes” subtext just rings really flat (false) nowadays, so it’s kind of weird to get back in that headspace where men were expected to be creepily persistent in their wooing efforts.

For example, Jake keeps trying to reconnect with Billie (play by Sean Young), another pilot he’d dated before. He asks her multiple times to go out with him again, he corners her and oozes sexual innuendo (even at the laundromat) and gets into a brawl over her attention at a dance club with a guy wearing a bolo tie. Billie has to put her foot down, “I’m not a piece of steak for you two to fight over.”

He keeps doubling-down on this technique, even while they are flying helicopters together Preston finds a way to make it cringey (even though I think it’s supposed to be funny).

“I’d love to nail it,” he says referencing the use of missiles as a metaphor for…yeah, that.

Flying close to Billie’s copter, Jake says, “I remember you always liked me on top.”

To which, Billie replies, “You still got your brains in your cockpit,” and then, “We’ve both been there before when those guns just didn’t go off.” (Snap! Nice come-backer.)

In the end of course she comes around, falls head-over-heels for the charms of Jake Preston and his big aviator sunglasses. When they get deployed to South America though, Jake must accept the hard truth that Billie has elected to be part of the dangerous combat mission. He wants to keep her safe, but she’s already shown that as the sorta-liberated female, she likes to be in the driver’s seat. Jake even asks her at one point, “Hey, baby, don’t you ever want me to win?”

The answer of course is no and when Billie will not be dissuaded from taking part in combat, Jake throws his typical Cage tantrum on the runway by kicking maniacally at the air.

His one weakness: it’s in the eyes.

The laughably odd chink in the Jake’s bad-ass pilot armor is his inability to process information when “in the bag” or visually limited. This flaw in his impeccable “game” shows up during the flight simulation phase of his training. While piloting what looks like an Atari game with low budget graphics, Jake screams over and over, “I AM THE GREATEST. I AM THE GREATEST. I AM THE GREATEST.” He yells that he’s going to, “Shoot em blast em nab em grab em shake em bake em cook em clean em boil em kick em nab em twist em…ALL GONE BYE BYE.”

(What’s oddly funny about his, too, is that it’s his co-pilot Breaker who does the actual shooting. Jake is the pilot flying the copter, so he’s technically just getting them in the “kitchen” to use his own metaphor.)

When Jake moves to the assisted site of the camera / computer, he can no longer navigate with the same level of expertise. Wearing the monocle he looked a lot like Fred Armisen in the Google Glass skit shown here.

This chink in the armor brings Jake low and almost causes him to wash out of the mission, but Little comes to the rescue, helps Jake overcome his deficiency. Applying a periscope technique via some PVC piping taped to Jake’s head with duct tape and a pair of women’s panties, Jake is able to learn how to drive around in a jeep and uncouple his bodily / navigation movements from his visual perception (I guess?) It’s like Jake says, “C’mon there nothing wrong with my brain. It’s my eye that are the problem.”

Once those eyes get fixed, he’s able to pilot the mission.

All’s well that ends well.

The movie, which I can’t really spoil since it should be obvious what happens, ends in the prescribed American fashion. Lots of stuff gets blown up (even a satellite that looks like someone’s Dish network). Copters go down. Little does his part. Billie does hers. Jake says things like, “You’re not touching her, you filthy piece of shit!” The cartel loses. America wins (again).

Best Nicolas Cage lines from the movie

[Jake] “Breaker, do you like history?”

[Breaker] “No”

[Jake] “Well you better start liking it because we are about to make it!”

“I am your mother now, Calvin.” Jake to Breaker (no idea what he meant by it.)

“Solid gold, Rattler. Solid gold.”

“Just so you know, I will be kicking your ass today.” Jake to Little before flight drill.

First for a Nicolas Cage character as Jake Preston

• First scene in a laundromat
• Chomping on gum and blowing bubbles
• First Kramer-slide into a scene
• First sex scene to a Phil Collins song (Do You Remember?)
• First time in a flight simulator
• First time boxing and sparring (he knocks out Tommy Lee Jones!)
• First role as a pilot
• First time sweet talking and caressing a helicopter (but Maverick does the exact same thing, eye-roll.)

Recurrences

• Coming on to women in a border-line too aggressive way (Multiple)
• Wearing a panty on his head (see Raising Arizona, Wild at Heart)
• Throwing a karate kick tantrum and/or kicking as a show of emotion (see Wild at Heart)

Winding up this mess

Ok, this was a pretty long diatribe for a movie and genre that is not one of my favorites. I will say if I had to fly with a wing man of either Phil Collins or Kenny Loggins I think I’m going with Phil nine times out of ten. (Also, not very American of me.)

So I guess in the ultimate battle of Top Gun vs. Fire Birds, I am firmly in the Fire Birds / Nicolas Cage / Phil Collins camp. The movie is more ridiculous, more formulaic, and more blase than the original movie that cast the mold, but in some ways it’s also more American, at least from my perspective. And therefore, IT IS THE GREATEST! (Meh, whatever, ‘Merica!)