"I don't mean what is the best 80's movie, or the most popular 80's movie, but what is the movie that most encapsulates everything about the decade. I'm talking the aesthetics, the politics, the cultural trends, developments in the film industry, the music. I'm talking about a movie that could not exist in any other decade. Something that you could hand to someone who's never seen a movie and say this is the 1980s embodied in one film."
For me it was Indiana Jones or Star Wars ... as a kid in the 80s, these two movies completely occupied our imaginations for most of the decade.
Honourable mention for me is .... Commando ... with Schwarzenegger ... (every time we had a game pretending for war or shooting each other with toy guns, I did or someone in our group would mimic the suit up scene getting ready for battle)