It may not have been his first movie, but if it wasn’t for Top Gun then I don’t think Tom Cruise would be as big a star as he is today. This film made Cruise a household name in 1986 and for the rest of the Eighties he was one of Hollywood’s most bankable actors.
Top Gun itself has also made itself part of popular culture history, at the time making Aviator sunglasses and bomber jackets cool and making the phrase “I feel the need… The need for speed” a much quoted line. It also got a generation of kids interested in becoming a fighter pilot, and is probably where a lot of people got their inspiration from when coming up with a cool sounding nickname when playing video games online!
Looking at the film today it still holds up well, mainly due to the fact that the footage of the jet planes flying about is actually jet planes flying about, not model shots or as it would be today, computer generated images. Indeed the film makers even managed to convince the US Navy to fire two real missiles, such were the lengths they went to for realism.