Word: thunderings
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Cruise meets with emotional setback when his best friend and fellow pilot/driver (Michael Rooker in Thunder) dies in plane crash/incurs brain damage in car crash, which he blames himself for. Begins to doubt his abilities and can't fly/drive anymore. Looses nerve in aerial engagements/NASCAR races...
Cruise regains form after (brief) emotional dilemna with help of understanding flight instructer/crew chief and love interest (in Thunder played by Nichole Kidman), and her role as his superior is compromised by their entanglement. Love interest is beautiful bright professor of astrophysics/neurosurgeon who can't believe she is sleeping with infantile pilot/driver and feels forced to give Cruise a lecture on his immaturity...
These similarites are hardly accidental. Half the story credit goes to Cruise, who should have known better than to try his hand at scriptwriting, much less forging Top Gun. But it was Simpson and Bruckheimer who saw to it that Thunder bore their tired blockbuster stamp. The producers bought themselves one of the best screenwriters money can buy in Robert Towne and he responded by slavishly helping Cruise plagiarize...
...prime example is Thunder's emotional climax, in which Duvall shouts at his young charge, "You're scared, you're scared!" To which Cruise deftly retorts "You're scared, too!" Typical of the entire movie, Towne does not set up this, or any other of the films' emotional turns, with any believability. Cruise's breathtaking response is preceeded by a bewildering psychoanalysis of Duvall's character which would seem to require telepathy and clairvoyance to produce...
...that the incongruous fact that the corporate logos generously splashed all over the screen have already parlayed themselves into commercial advertisements and promotional gimmicks in the real world, and you have the sum and substance of Days of Thunder...