1990s Science Fiction
CGI breakthroughs and millennial anxiety on the big screen.
13 results
The Matrix
By day, Thomas Anderson writes software; by night, as the hacker Neo, he chases a phrase that haunts the net: the Matrix. The answer — that reality is a simulation run by machines farming humanity for power, and that he may be the anomaly foretold to end it — arrives with sunglasses, a red pill, and the best action cinema of the decade.
The Iron Giant
Maine, 1957. Young Hogarth Hughes discovers a colossal robot that fell from space, its memory wiped, hiding in the woods behind his house. As Hogarth teaches the Giant about the world — and about choice — a paranoid government agent closes in, convinced the visitor is a Cold War weapon that must be destroyed before it destroys them first.
Dark City
John Murdoch wakes in a hotel bathtub with no memory, a dead woman in the next room, and detectives closing in for murders he can't remember committing. As he runs through a city where it is always midnight, he begins noticing what no one else does: at 12:00 exactly, the entire population falls asleep, the buildings physically rearrange themselves — and pale men in long coats move among the sleepers, injecting new memories into new lives.
Starship Troopers
In a militarized future where citizenship must be earned through federal service, high school graduate Johnny Rico enlists in the Mobile Infantry alongside his friends, expecting glory. Instead, he finds himself on the front lines of an all-out interstellar war against the Arachnids, a species of massive, ravenous alien insects — while the propaganda broadcasts back home keep insisting humanity is winning.
Contact
Radio astronomer Dr. Ellie Arroway has spent her career searching for proof of extraterrestrial intelligence against the skepticism of the scientific establishment and her own government funders. When she finally detects an unmistakable signal from the star Vega — instructions for building a machine of unknown purpose — Ellie is thrust into a collision between science, faith, politics and her own deepest need to believe that the universe holds more than empty static.
Twelve Monkeys
In 2035, decades after a virus killed five billion people and drove the survivors underground, prisoner James Cole is sent back in time — not to prevent the outbreak, which is impossible, but to trace its source. Battered between decades and diagnosed insane in 1990, Cole begins to wonder if the doctors are right, while a childhood memory of an airport shooting keeps circling closer.
Ghost in the Shell
New Port City, 2029. Major Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg security officer whose body is entirely artificial, hunts an elusive hacker known as the Puppet Master — an entity that ghost-hacks human minds and rewrites their memories. But the closer she gets, the more the case turns inward: if her body is manufactured and her memories can be edited, what exactly is the 'ghost' in her shell that makes her her?
Johnny Mnemonic
2021: half the world suffers from a technology-induced plague, and the most valuable data travels not on networks — too easily hacked — but inside the heads of mnemonic couriers. Johnny is one of them, and his latest job stuffs his implanted memory far beyond safe capacity with data the Yakuza and a pharmaceutical giant will kill for. He has roughly a day to make delivery before the payload literally destroys his brain — the same brain he emptied of his own childhood to make room for cargo.
Strange Days
Los Angeles, the last two days of 1999. Lenny Nero, ex-cop turned black-market dealer, sells SQUID recordings — full sensory captures of other people's experiences, straight from their cerebral cortex to yours. Addicted to replaying tapes of his own lost relationship, Lenny is dragged out of his loop when a snuff recording lands in his hands: evidence of a murder that connects to his ex, a music-industry conspiracy, and a police killing that could set the burning city off entirely.
Jurassic Park
Billionaire John Hammond has done the impossible: cloned dinosaurs from DNA preserved in amber, and built a theme park around them on a Costa Rican island. He invites two paleontologists, a chaos mathematician and his own grandchildren for a preview weekend — the same weekend a bribed employee shuts down the fences.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Two terminators arrive in Los Angeles: a reprogrammed T-800 sent to protect ten-year-old John Connor, and the T-1000 — a liquid-metal prototype that can look like anyone — sent to kill him. With Sarah Connor institutionalized for telling the truth, the future's only hope is a boy, his mother, and the machine that once hunted her.
The Rocketeer
1938, Los Angeles. Stunt pilot Cliff Secord stumbles onto a prototype jetpack hidden in his hangar by gangsters — and straps it on. As word of a flying man spreads, Cliff finds himself hunted by Neville Sinclair, a matinee-idol movie star secretly working for Nazi agents desperate to recover the rocket before it reaches Germany, with only his mechanic Peevy and his girlfriend Jenny standing between the jetpack and the Third Reich.
Total Recall
Construction worker Doug Quaid can't stop dreaming of Mars, so he buys the memory of a trip from Rekall Inc. — and the implant chair wakes something already buried in his head. Soon he's killing trained agents by reflex, and the only certainty is a message from his own face: get your ass to Mars.
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