Top Gun: Maverick's Soundtrack Feels Incomplete Without 'Take My Breath Away'

No one can blame "Top Gun: Maverick" for skimping on the nostalgia factor. From cool aerial dogfights to Pete Mitchell (Tom Cruise) being all rebellious, the movie takes pretty much everything that people liked about "Top Gun" and refines it into pure tentpole action drama. Yes, there's a volleyball scene. Yep, Val Kilmer's Tom "Iceman" Kazansky turns up in a tragic, yet pivotal fashion. Except for the return of Charlie (Kelly McGillis), the movie offers almost everything a fan of the original could hope for. Almost.

Despite the undeniable accolades of the Cruise movie that saved the theater industry, one iconic song from the original "Top Gun" is conspicuously absent from the otherwise callback-heavy "Top Gun: Maverick" soundtrack: Berlin's iconic ballad "Take My Breath Away." In an interview with The Wrap, the movie's music producer Lorne Balfe revealed the real reason behind the song's omission. "It's interesting, because I think a few people have been saying about 'Take My Breath Away': Why is that not in the movie!? But it doesn't belong there. The different love stories are different; why would it belong there? It wouldn't have made any kind of sense," he explained. 

As such, the fact that the song isn't in the movie seems to be closely tied to the fact that Charlie doesn't feature in the film — after all, Maverick has a different love interest in this movie. Still, as Balfe's own comments reveal, the song clearly made an impact in the original movie, and many people would have loved to hear it in the sequel.

The "Top Gun: Maverick" soundtrack is quite happy to use Kenny Loggins' iconic "Danger Zone," and its score also features several callbacks to the original movie. However, Lorne Balfe was quick to note that a song like "Danger Zone" is a very different animal from "Take My Breath Away," because while the latter encapsulates a romance that isn't present in the sequel, the former comes with no such baggage. "But definitely using 'Danger Zone' was something that you can take the baseline and have fun with it," he said. "That song belongs in both movies."

Arguably the biggest attention on the "Top Gun: Maverick" soundtrack has gone to an original ballad, Lady Gaga's "Hold My Hand" — which indeed picks up where "Take My Breath Away" left things as the "official" song of the movie's main romance. That being said, the movie is otherwise so full of nods at the "Top Gun" soundtrack that it's easy to start wondering where "Take My Breath Away" is.