Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 272

Dogfights and afterburners: Top Gun' a high-flying challenge for Tom Cruise By Jeff Silverman trra be first thing you pick 1 1 up on is the sound the il ear-splitting, brain-busting, bone-shaking rumble, the rumble that shatters like the end of the world: Tom Cruise hears the sound md turns away from his lunch directly toward its source; an F-14 Tomcat roaring down an adjacent runway. His concentration breaks, and a smile slips through lips so tight they seem on guard duty. As the jet screams into the atmosphere, the smile takes on an afterburner's glow. "Ah," sighs the actor, searching the sky through aviator, lenses, "the sound of freedom." The sound of freedom indeed. It's the sound of an air-, combat maneuver a hop beginning, the sound of the process of peace-keeping and military readiness not unlike the sound of war.

It's the sound of sleek, thundering jets elegant, supreme machines man-' ned by tip-of-the-spear pilots-rushing into the height of high noon, dots above San Diego's Miramar Air Station, flashes of fire spewing behind them, climbing, streaking, the dots disappearing, and then all that's left is the memory of the sound. And one hell of a sound it is especially if you happen to be making a movie, which Tom Cruise, at the moment, happens to be. The film, called "Top Gun," is a celluloid ode to Navy pilots and the intensive training the best of the breed, go through, and if there is a single constant to the location shooting at Miramar, it is that ceaseless, tireless, pounding sound. On the Fightertown, U.S.A., landing strip, you give up the peace and stillness of a controlled environment for accommodation to the military, and receive, in return, the stunning images of fighter planes shimmering in the afternoon light. Not a bad deal, really.

"But it's very hard for actors to focus on who they are trying to portray when you've got a big F-14 banking behind you," cautions the film's director, Tony Scott As captain of this ship, he has got to be practical about things. "From the direc- tor's point of view, it's very hard to keep your perspective on a scene, and what you're trying to get from your actors while all this is going on on the flight line behind you. You find all you can do is squeeze in your performances, fighting this element. In the end, it's the noise that scrambles your brain." But it's also the noise that exhilarates and thrills, and it's the exhilaration and the thrill of flying and the men who ride the skies that Scott and producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer are trying to infuse into every frame of the $13 million production. To get that feeling, you put up with the sound.

You learn to work with it, and you learn to work around it. Scheduled for release next year by Paramount, "Top Gun" stars Cruise as a hotshot Navy fighter pilot with the call name Maverick, who, along with his backseat RIO radar intercept operator Goose, played by "Revenge of the Nerds" and "The Sure Thing's" Anthony Edwards, has been tapped to attend the exclusive Navy Fighter Weapons School at Miramar, a program known throughout the military as Top Gun. Kelly McGillis of "Witness" also stars as a civilian astrophysicist who debriefs the pilots after each hop, analyzes their maneuvers, and, against her better judgment, winds up falling for Cruise's character. But it's Top Gun itself its milieu, its look and its ethos that stands out as much as any of the principal performers as the real star of the film. Named for the annual air-to-air fighter competitions staged by the armed services in the years after World War II, Top Gun, the was born out of necessity in the midst of the Vietnam era.

During the first years of the conflict, America was losing one of its own fighter planes for every three of the enemy it was shooting down. In World War-II, the ratio had been 1 to IS; in Korea an even more impressive 1 to 17. In 1968, the Navy recommended the creation of a sophisticated arena for fighter pilot training, and a year later the program was implemented, the best pilots from each naval air squadron being selected to participate in a five-week course of daily classroom training and air combat maneuvers. By the second half of Vietnam, with the first Top Gun graduates back in action and passing on what they had learned to the other crews in their squadrons, the Navy's kill ratio had zoomed from 3 to 1 to 12 to 1. Top Gun had become a very visible arm of aviator training.

It was something all Navy pilots aspired to..