Hopeful
moodScience fiction that ultimately believes in a better tomorrow.
The Day the Earth Stood Still
A flying saucer lands in Washington, D.C., and out steps Klaatu, a humanoid alien with an ultimatum: abandon nuclear weapons and the violence they represent, or Earth will be destroyed as a threat to the wider galaxy. Escaping military custody to live quietly among ordinary Americans, Klaatu — accompanied everywhere by his silent, seemingly all-powerful robot Gort — searches for someone who will actually listen before his patience runs out.
GemSilent Running
In a future where all plant life on Earth has gone extinct, botanist Freeman Lowell tends the last surviving forests aboard a fleet of orbiting greenhouse domes, cared for alongside three drone robots he's named Huey, Dewey and Louie. When corporate orders arrive to jettison and destroy the domes so the ships can return to commercial service, Lowell makes a desperate choice to save the only forest left in the universe — whatever the cost.
Star Wars
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.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
After a close encounter with a UFO, Indiana power-company lineman Roy Neary becomes obsessed with a mountain shape he can't explain — one of hundreds of ordinary people worldwide being quietly invited to a rendezvous the government is racing to keep secret.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tomorrowland
Optimistic teenager Casey Newton receives a mysterious pin that, when touched, drops her into a vision of Tomorrowland — a gleaming hidden city of impossible future technology. Tracking down the pin's origin leads her to Frank Walker, a disillusioned former boy-genius who was exiled from that city decades ago, and together they race to understand why humanity's brightest possible future has been sealed away and left to die.