Tom Cruise is one of the Peter Pan actors that doesn’t appear to have aged a day since his first appearance in and as “Top Gun” in 1987. The debut of the sequel, ‘Top Gun, Maverick,’ more than 30 years after the first, was a full-fledged Cannes event.

As the band roared out ‘Great Balls Of Fire,’ the anthem from the original movie that had us all bopping along, Cruise waved to the shouting audience that had been lined the Croisette for hours, gladly posing for photographs.

The term “dude bros” had not yet been coined when the original film was released. “Top Gun” was nothing more than a bunch of dude-bros displaying their machismo while also attempting to save the planet. In the way it indulgently performed its boys-will-be-boys thing, as the ‘boys’ cluster around the lone lady on the base, it was a film of its day.

We fell for Kelly McGillis’s beautiful instructor, and we fall for their relationship. “You go home with the hottest lady,” a character tells Cruise’s Captain Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, and the captain smirks, recognising that his charisma is a magnet with the ladies, while McGillis watches.

Aside from being a cultural phenomenon, the film was responsible for the meteoric rise in popularity of Ray Bans, the sunglasses worn by all cool aviators, as well as all the police and crooks in Hollywood and Bollywood.

Cruise is the last of a generation of celebrities that we forgive even when they do the most outrageous things – does bouncing up and down on the couch with a renowned anchor still count? “Top Gun” sent Cruise’s career into orbit, and he’s still going strong, completing impossible missions and circling the loops.

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