Tony Scott Dies And Leaves Us With Top Gun And The Good Wife

Tony Scott directing Tom Cruise on the set of Top Gun.

I had a moment of pause before walking into The Bourne Legacy. For some reason I read Tony Gilroy and thought Tony Scott and there was a brief moment of terrible nerves. Scott’s final films were kinetic to the visual extreme. The man whose cinematic propensities would inspire a whole generation of filmmakers who would in turn forever change the Hollywood blockbuster seemed to be parodying himself in his final films. Indeed he seemed to be parodying the entire film movement he in fact inspired.

The smash cuts of the Bourne series. The visual melange of CGI and sweaty heroes and heroines found in Michael Bay’s films. It can be traced back to Tony Scott and two very important films: Top Gun and Days of Thunder. Scott would go smarter in later films and he’d get more absurdly bombastic in even later films, but in those two films he seemed to develop the prototypical Hollywood action epic. And he made Tom Cruise not just a star, but a cultural icon.

Tony Scott’s films could sometimes be hard to follow. Often they could be ridiculous. He cast a 23-year-old Nicole Kidman as a neurosurgeon and turned a few schluppy train engineers into Denzel Washington and Chris Pine. He also gave Halle Berry one of her first film roles, made Denzel Washington into an action star and produced The Good Wife.

His death is shocking and tragic, but his contributions to our pop culture are innumerable and he will be missed. He never made a Bourne film. Just inspired them. And while I’m still not sure if I would have liked his take on them I keep thinking about it today. That brief moment where I though Tony Scott was Tony Gilroy. It would have been interesting wouldn’t it have been?

And while it would have been hella entertaining.