There’s a lot of nostalgia for the 1980s these days, exemplified in movies and TV shows like It and Stranger Things. The presidency of Ronald Reagan brought on a renewed sense of patriotism and American nationalism that led to John Rambo oiling up his abs and donning a bullet belt. There was also a heavy focus on commercialism, as malls were popping up in every town and being hyped as the hot new hangout spots.
Amblin was at its peak, and high school comedies were very popular, thanks to the work of John Hughes and the “Brat Pack.” The ‘80s offered a lot of great movies. Here are 10 Movies That Defined 80s Cinema.
Top Gun (1986)
The pinnacle of pro-military Reagan-era nationalism, Top Gun stars Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer as fighter pilots at the most prestigious training program. This movie has all the staples of 80s actioners: motorcycles, sunglasses, oiled-up muscles, a fusty superior who disagrees with the hero’s roguish ways.
Top Gun’s depiction of aerial warfare as awesome Hollywood action sequences was so effective that the U.S. Navy used the film as a recruitment video, even sending recruiters to theaters to catch moviegoers coming out of the theater and sign up the ones who wanted to be Maverick.
Ghostbusters (1984)
By sticking closely to their premise and deviating wildly from the actual script, the team behind 1984’s Ghostbusters managed to create a comedy masterpiece.
Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd, and Ernie Hudson all have spectacular chemistry, and their on-set improvisations – particularly by Murray – gave the movie a spontaneous comic energy that most of today’s comedies try and fail to recapture.
The Breakfast Club (1985)
John Hughes made a bunch of high school movies in the 80s (two are included in this list alone), but The Breakfast Club stands out as the epitome of all of them.
The writer-director took five stock characters from his chosen genre – a jock, a popular girl, an outcast, a nerd, and a goth – and humanized them by sticking them in Saturday detention together and forcing them to interact. After a day of getting to know each other, they realize they’re not so different after all.
Stand By Me (1986)
Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me is the definitive coming-of-age movie. In many ways, it’s also a road movie (or, railroad movie); it’s about a group of characters who go on a journey to reach a destination. In this case, the characters are a group of boys in the 50s (they say nostalgia works on a 30-year cycle), each with their own unresolved personal issues and the destination is the location of a dead body one of them heard about.
By the end of the movie, the body is the last thing on anyone’s mind. The characters hijack the story and make it about their internal emotional journeys. The framing narrative is a little corny, but other than that, Stand by Me is a masterpiece.
The Goonies (1985)
Perhaps the height of the Amblin era, The Goonies brings the pure escapism and lively sense of adventure of Raiders of the Lost Ark to the familiar suburban environments of E.T.
The movie’s greatest quality is its timeless story, conceived by Steven Spielberg himself: some kids enjoy a final weekend together before their homes are repossessed to make way for an expanding country club, and they find a map that sends them on a treacherous treasure hunt. The characters are all memorable and wonderfully acted, and there are plenty of moments that have become iconic.
A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)
After John Carpenter’s success with Halloween in 1978, slashers reigned supreme in ‘80s horror cinema: Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine, Sleepaway Camp, etc. The epitome of this era of horror is Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, in which the killer, Freddy Krueger, targets high schoolers in their dreams.
From the twist that places the blame on the kids’ parents to Craven’s deft blending of the real world and the dream world, A Nightmare on Elm Street is visionary horror at its best. It has that rare blend of commercial appeal and impeccable craft.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
John Hughes had a knack for finding deeper meaning in simplistic premises. The aforementioned The Breakfast Club uses a Saturday detention for an hour and a half of soul-searching.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off uses a high schooler skipping school for a day to meditate on human existence. It’s a truly timeless movie that teaches viewers a very important lesson: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Die Hard (1988)
Arguably the greatest action movie ever made, and possibly even the greatest Christmas movie on top of that, Die Hard is a universally adored masterpiece that set the bar way too high at the beginning of Bruce Willis’ career as a movie star.
His everyman performance as John McClane is what really made this movie connect with ‘80s moviegoers. The consumerist excess of the ‘80s can be seen in Argyle’s partying in the back of the limo and Ellis’ Gordon Gekko wannabe persona.
The Terminator (1984)
The nightclub featured in The Terminator, where Sarah Connor first encounters the T-800, is called “Tech Noir.” This was writer-director James Cameron’s way of naming the genre he was pretty much creating with the movie. As technological advancements were on the rise, fear of technology was prominent in the ‘80s; it’s no surprise that this movie grew out of a nightmare Cameron had.
The plotting is masterfully simplistic, while the world-building and backstory and info dumps are expertly woven into the story without ever distracting from the action.
Back To The Future (1985)
“Wait a minute, Doc. Are you telling me you built a time machine...out of a DeLorean?” Robert Zemeckis’ time-travel comedy, Back to the Future, is basically a perfect movie. Not a single line of dialogue is wasted; they all either develop the characters or advance the plot or, in the most impressive cases, foreshadow later events in the movie.
Every actor is ideal for their role, particularly Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, whose palpable chemistry made Doc and Marty one of the greatest on-screen pairings of all time.