Action-Packed

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Science fiction built around big set pieces and relentless momentum.

Logan's Run (1976) poster

Logan's Run

1976

In a domed city of endless pleasure centuries after civilization's collapse, every citizen lives in comfort until the age of thirty — at which point they're required to submit to Carousel, a ritual execution disguised as reincarnation. Logan 5, an enforcer tasked with hunting down citizens who try to run rather than submit, is ordered to go undercover as a runner himself — and begins to question everything his society has told him about what actually happens after the crystal in his palm turns black.

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Star Wars (1977) poster

Star Wars

1977

A farm boy on a desert planet intercepts a distress call hidden in a droid, and is swept into a galactic rebellion alongside a cynical smuggler, a fugitive princess and the last of an ancient order of knights — with a moon-sized battle station waiting at the end of the run.

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Flash Gordon (1980) poster

Flash Gordon

1980

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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Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) poster

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior

1981

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.

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Escape from New York (1981) poster

Escape from New York

1981

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.

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TRON (1982) poster

TRON

1982

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.

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The Terminator (1984) poster

The Terminator

1984

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.

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Back to the Future (1985) poster

Back to the Future

1985

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.

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Aliens (1986) poster

Aliens

1986

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.

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RoboCop (1987) poster

RoboCop

1987

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.

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Predator (1987) poster

Predator

1987

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.

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Total Recall (1990) poster

Total Recall

1990

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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Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) poster

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

1991

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.

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The Rocketeer (1991) poster

The Rocketeer

1991

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.

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Jurassic Park (1993) poster

Jurassic Park

199310/10

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.

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Johnny Mnemonic (1995) poster

Johnny Mnemonic

1995

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.

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Starship Troopers (1997) poster

Starship Troopers

1997

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.

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The Matrix (1999) poster

The Matrix

1999

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.

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Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) poster

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

2003

John Connor, now 25 and off the grid, has spent a decade waiting for a Judgment Day that never seems to come. When a new, shape-shifting Terminatrix — the T-X — is sent back to finish what the T-1000 couldn't, an aging T-850 arrives to protect him and Kate Brewster, the woman fate has chosen to stand beside him when the missiles finally fly.

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Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) poster

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

2004

1939, an alternate New York besieged by giant robots stomping through Manhattan. Mercenary pilot Joe 'Sky Captain' Sullivan and journalist Polly Perkins — his ex — race to uncover who is behind the attacks, chasing the trail across the globe to a hidden island fortress where a mad scientist's decades-old plan for 'the world of tomorrow' is finally coming to fruition.

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Terminator Genisys (2015) poster

Terminator Genisys

2015

Kyle Reese is sent back to 1984 to protect Sarah Connor exactly as he always has — except this time she's waiting for him, already trained by an aging Terminator guardian, and the timeline he remembers has been rewritten out from under him. As a new digital threat called Genisys prepares to launch as humanity's most trusted piece of software, Reese, Connor and the machine that raised her race to stop an apocalypse that no longer looks anything like the one he was warned about.

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Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) poster

Terminator: Dark Fate

2019

Decades after stopping Judgment Day, Sarah Connor is still hunting Terminators alone — and still grieving the future she thought she'd saved. When a new machine, the shape-splitting Rev-9, is sent back to kill a young factory worker in Mexico City, Sarah crosses paths with Grace, an augmented super-soldier from a future that was never supposed to exist, and with an old, unexpected face who has spent years quietly living with what he did.

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