The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

42. 1984 - The Terminator

The Terminator
Orion Pictures

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.

 
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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.