The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

47. 1979 - Alien

Alien Sigourney Weaver
20th Century Studios

Honourable Mentions: All That Jazz, Apocalypse Now, The Jerk

What more fitting way to close out what historian Philip Jenkins called the "Decade of Nightmares" than with arguably the best filmic nightmare the seventies conjured? Ridley Scott's Alien is the pinnacle of existential terror - an inversion of the wonder and spectacle that had defined the decade's other iconic sci-fi films (Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), which peered into the inky void of space and saw not the limitless possibilities of exploration, but instead a dwarfing maw of uncertainty and menace.

It's no surprise that Scott and screenwriter Dan O'Bannon's depiction of a rusting, decaying future dominated by vicious corporations resonated with a seventies audience, but while Alien's political allegory is compelling, its ability to conjure a profound sense of primordial dread - pioneered by the biomechanical stylings of H. R. Giger - is what has led it to endure for so long.

It's rare for a film to confront the viewer with something unseen - an image that is, in effect, totally alien - and yet that's what Scott's production accomplished. It's the perfect lifeform. (And the sequels aren't half-bad either.)

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.