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“Control is an illusion, you infantile egomaniac. Nobody knows what’s gonna happen next: not on a freeway, not in an airplane, not inside our own bodies, and certainly not on a racetrack with 40 other infantile egomaniacs.”

Back in 1986 a young Tom Cruise teamed with director Tony Scott for Top Gun. The film ended up pulling in over $170 million. A sequel appeared out of the question, but that wasn’t going to stop this box office dynamic duo from figuring something out. They decided to just refilm Top Gun. So, if jets go fast, what else goes fast? Before long someone realized that racing cars go fast. So, before you know it Tom Cruise was once again teaming with Tony Scott as a cocky young upstart, this time in the race game. If you watch the two films back to back, the code really isn’t that hard to break. All of the same plot points and beats are exactly the same, just in a new environment. The public wasn’t fooled then; the film took in less than half what Top Gun brought. You shouldn’t be fooled now. Days Of Thunder is Top Gun redux.
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This is the film that literally started a trend. Within a decade, submarine films would make a huge comeback in the big-budget film industry. Titles like Crimson Tide, U-571, and K-19: The Widowmaker all took a little from Red October. Maybe the Cold War is over, but our fascination with that modern version of cowboys and Indians doesn’t seem to have waned much in the last nearly 20 years. While our relationship with Russia might be up and down over the last two decades, there is still a part of our culture that can’t seem to let go of that classic game of good guys and bad guys. It’s not unique to the former Soviet Union by any means. World War II has been over for more than 60 years, but the occasional Nazi bad guys still make their presence known from time to time. Maybe it’s those accents. Whatever the reason, the seemingly dated subject matter of Red October is never a liability to the film. When Red October came out, the Soviet Union had just fallen a mere two years earlier, and there were some who suggested the film was an inappropriate reminder of those recent bygone days and might even be considered a slap in the face to the new regime in Russia. Fortunately this was not one of those instances where Hollywood let its often hypocritical sense of political correctness get in the way of a great film.
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“Well, you think about it, Ethan, it was inevitable. No more cold war. No more secrets you keep from yourself. Answer to no one but yourself. Then, you wake up one morning and find out the President is running the country without your permission. The son of a bitch, how dare he. Then you realize, it’s over. You are an obsolete piece of hardware, not worth upgrading, you got a lousy marriage, and 62 grand a year.”

The more things change, the more they tend to remain the same. In 1996 Paramount was nearing the end of a run of feature films that started with a 1960’s Desilu Studios television series called Star Trek. That same year the studio was beginning a run of feature films based on a 1960’s Desilu Studios television series that at one time shared an actor with Star Trek, Leonard Nimoy.
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