Action Sci-Fi
subgenreExplosive set pieces with a science fiction engine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
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.
Terminator Salvation
2018. Judgment Day has happened, and John Connor is a field commander in humanity's war against Skynet's machines — not yet the prophesied leader of legend. When Marcus Wright, a death-row inmate who doesn't understand what he's become, walks out of the wasteland searching for a future he doesn't remember signing away, Connor's hunt for a teenage Kyle Reese collides with the truth about what Skynet is really building.
Terminator Genisys
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.
Terminator: Dark Fate
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.