10 Movie Soundtracks Better Than The Film

Movies are, by nature, a visual medium. For as great as the plot is or even the character portrayals are, the core of whether a movie is actually good or not comes down to the moving pictures that you actually see onscreen. However, music is what can sometimes separate a good movie from a great one.

Across every single genre, you can find film soundtracks that outshine the movie that they're actually a part of. From ambient score to a play-by-play of mainstream hits, every one of these soundtracks ended up becoming much bigger than the audience had ever anticipated. But if the best part of your movie is the music, does that necessarily mean that the movie is bad?

Hardly. While a filmmaker might try their best to make the magic leap off the screen, these songs just hold up as the better way to convey the story rather than the visuals they're a part of. Instead of showing you around vast landscapes or put you in the middle of action scenes, these accompanying soundtracks paint a vivid picture in your mind without having to show you anything.

Here are just a handful of instances where the background music was not only able to enhance the film, but even surpass it.

So many amazing cliches of the '80s are captured in Top Gun. From fighter planes taking down rogue flyers to Tom Cruise as the lovable badass he always plays, the film really has all that tough-guy machismo that people look back on with a weird sense of fondness. Then again, a big reason why we look back on this so much is due to how many great '80s tunes actually wind up in the film.

While we do have some '80s cheese to go around with bands like Loverboy, the use of Berlin's "Take My Breath Away" as the emotional centerpiece of the film made the rest of the toughness feel almost drab by comparison. But like any good '80s film, this film lives and dies on its Kenny Loggins songs.

The studio knew they hit the jackpot with these songs too, given that they play "Danger Zone" no less than three separate times during the movie.

Even some of the more throwaway cuts like "Playing with the Boys" are so catchy that you won't even question why a bunch of fighter pilots are taking time out of their day to play beach volleyball. A lot of the fundamentals of Top Gun might not be the greatest in their field, but in terms of musical accompaniment, no one else in the decade could touch them.