The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025
42. 1984 - The Terminator
Honourable Mentions: Amadeus, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Paris, Texas
It's a hilarious irony that so many of the greatest films were at one time prophesied for failure. James Cameron's The Terminator - a tech-noir sci-fi horror tinged with nuclear anxieties - was one such effort, with anxieties at the time swirling around its perceived B-movie premise and the casting of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a figure who was not only pilloried for his Austrian accent and bodybuilding exploits by his contemporaries, but who also held huge reservations about the project himself.
Cameron was, back then, a novice filmmaker, with mostly VFX credits to his name and Piranha II: The Spawning his sole major release as a writer and director. There was precious little belief that The Terminator would turn out good, let alone be the star-making cultural reset it turned out to be, and yet it was all of that and more.
Sleek, mechanical, and immaculately arranged by Cameron and his VFX wizards, The Terminator remains a perfect Cold War parable but one with a prescience that has (sadly) extended far beyond its historical context. Not quite Cameron's peak, but a truly seminal piece of filmmaking that boasts a seismic impact.