1980s Science Fiction
Practical effects, synth scores, and high-concept sci-fi at its peak.
16 results
GemThey Live
A drifter looking for work in Los Angeles finds a box of sunglasses that reveal the truth: the billboards say OBEY, the money says THIS IS YOUR GOD, and the ruling class are skull-faced aliens running Earth as a third-world franchise. He responds the only way an American hero can — with a shotgun and a one-liner.
Akira
Neo-Tokyo, 2019, thirty-one years after a psychic detonation leveled the old city. Teenage biker Kaneda's gang collides with a secret government program when his volatile friend Tetsuo awakens powers that could end the world — powers connected to a name the state buried underground: Akira.
RoboCop
In a near-future Detroit run by mega-corporation OCP, officer Alex Murphy is executed by a gang on his first day in the worst precinct — then resurrected as RoboCop, a corporate-owned cyborg law-enforcement product. But fragments of Murphy remain, and they remember everything.
Predator
An elite rescue team led by Dutch Schaefer is dropped into a Central American jungle for a routine hostage extraction. The mission is a lie, and something else is in the canopy — a creature that hunts humans for sport, sees in heat, and collects skulls as trophies.
Aliens
Ellen Ripley, sole survivor of the Nostromo, is found drifting after 57 years in hypersleep — and nobody believes her story. When contact is lost with a colony on the very world where her crew found the derelict ship, she returns with a unit of cocky Colonial Marines. This time it isn't one alien.
Back to the Future
Teenager Marty McFly is accidentally blasted from 1985 to 1955 in a time machine his friend Doc Brown built out of a DeLorean. Stranded with no plutonium, he derails his own parents' first meeting — and has one week to make his father fall in love with his mother, or he'll never be born.
GemBrazil
In a retro-futuristic, totalitarian bureaucracy choking on paperwork and ductwork, low-level government clerk Sam Lowry spends his days processing forms and his nights escaping into elaborate flying dreams. When a literal typing error — a squashed fly jamming a printer, turning 'Tuttle' into 'Buttle' — sends the wrong man to his death, Sam's attempt to correct the paperwork pulls him into a nightmarish collision between his fantasies and a state that treats a clerical mistake as more dangerous than the person it actually kills.
The Terminator
In 2029, the machines that exterminated most of humanity lose the war — so they send an unstoppable cyborg assassin back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, the mother of the resistance leader who beat them. The resistance sends one soldier to protect her. He has a photograph, a sawed-off shotgun, and no way home.
Videodrome
Max Renn, president of a sleazy Toronto UHF station always hunting for harder content, stumbles onto a pirate broadcast called Videodrome: plotless scenes of torture that appear to be real. As he chases the signal's source, his perception begins to warp — hallucinations bleed into reality, his body starts to change, and Max discovers the broadcast isn't entertainment at all, but a weapon that rewires whoever watches it.
Blade Runner
Los Angeles, 2019: perpetual rain, perpetual night, perpetual advertising. Burned-out cop Rick Deckard is forced back to work hunting four escaped replicants — bioengineered humans with four-year lifespans who have come to Earth to meet their maker and demand more life.
The Thing
An American research station in Antarctica takes in a dog fleeing a Norwegian helicopter crew trying to kill it. The dog is not a dog. It is something that imitates — perfectly, cell by cell — and by the time the twelve men understand that, any of them could already be it.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
A gentle alien botanist is stranded in a California suburb when his ship leaves without him. Found by a lonely ten-year-old boy in the aftermath of his parents' divorce, the two form a bond so deep it becomes biological — while government agents close in and the visitor grows fatally homesick.
TRON
Video game programmer Kevin Flynn breaks into his former employer's mainframe to find evidence a rival executive stole his game designs — and is instead digitized by an experimental laser, pulled physically inside the computer system itself. Trapped in a neon-lit digital world where programs are living beings forced to compete in gladiatorial games by a tyrannical AI called the Master Control Program, Flynn allies with the security program Tron to fight his way back to the real world.
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
In the fuel-starved wasteland after civilization's collapse, burnt-out ex-cop Max Rockatansky stumbles into a war between a besieged refinery community and a marauder army — and reluctantly becomes the driver of their one chance at escape.
Escape from New York
By 1997, Manhattan Island has been walled off entirely and converted into a maximum-security prison where convicts are dumped and left to build their own lawless society. When Air Force One crashes inside the island with the President of the United States aboard, the authorities offer decorated ex-soldier and convicted bank robber Snake Plissken a full pardon for one impossible job: go in, get the President out, in 24 hours or less.
Flash Gordon
Football star Flash Gordon, travel agent Dale Arden and eccentric scientist Dr. Hans Zarkov are pulled through space to the planet Mongo, ruled by the tyrannical Ming the Merciless — who has set Earth in his crosshairs purely for sport. Flash must rally Mongo's warring kingdoms, the hawk-men of Sky City and the forest-dwelling Arboria, into a single rebellion before Ming's whim wipes out his home planet.
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