Philosophical
moodScience fiction more interested in big questions than big explosions.
Metropolis
In a vertical city where the wealthy live in tower gardens and the workers labor unseen in the machine rooms below, industrialist's son Freder falls for Maria, a worker who preaches peace between the classes — and follows her underground into a conspiracy involving a mad inventor, a stolen face, and a robot built to end the dream of unity for good.
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.
Godzilla
Nuclear testing in the Pacific awakens an ancient, radioactive creature that rises from the sea and levels Tokyo, impervious to every weapon the Japanese military can bring against it. As the city burns, a reclusive scientist wrestles with whether to use a discovery of his own — one terrible enough to kill the monster, and terrible enough that he fears what humanity will do with it next.
Forbidden Planet
A starship crew is sent to the planet Altair IV to check on a colony expedition that vanished twenty years earlier — and finds only two survivors: reclusive scientist Dr. Morbius, his daughter Altaira, and Robby, a robot of his own design. Morbius has uncovered the remains of a vanished super-civilization and its incomprehensible technology, but something invisible and murderous is still guarding its secrets — something that may be coming from inside Morbius himself.
2001: A Space Odyssey
From the discovery of a mysterious black monolith among prehistoric apes to a lunar excavation that uncovers another, buried and broadcasting toward Jupiter, humanity follows a trail it doesn't understand toward a destination it can't imagine. Aboard the spacecraft Discovery One, astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole share their mission with HAL 9000, an artificial intelligence of perfect, calm confidence — until HAL begins making decisions of its own.
Planet of the Apes
Astronaut George Taylor crash-lands on a distant planet where intelligent, talking apes rule as masters and mute, primitive humans are hunted as livestock and lab animals. Captured, caged, and stripped of his voice, Taylor must prove he's more than an animal to a ruling class of apes who have built their entire civilization on a founding lie about how the world came to be this way.
A Clockwork Orange
In a brutalist near-future Britain, charismatic delinquent Alex DeLarge leads his droogs through nights of 'ultra-violence' — until the state captures him and volunteers him for an experimental treatment that removes his ability to choose evil, and with it, his ability to choose at all.
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.
Soylent Green
New York City, 2022: forty million people are crammed into a metropolis choking on pollution and starvation, and most of the population survives on rations of a mysterious, government-distributed wafer called Soylent Green. When a wealthy executive of the company that makes it is murdered, hard-bitten detective Frank Thorn's investigation uncovers a conspiracy far worse than the killing itself — a secret buried in exactly what Soylent Green is actually made of.
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.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
A massive, unidentified energy cloud is on a direct collision course with Earth, destroying every ship that tries to stop it. Admiral James T. Kirk resumes command of a newly refitted USS Enterprise and reassembles his original crew for one more mission — one that will force them to confront what's actually inside the cloud, and what it wants.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 Day the Earth Stood Still
An alien visitor named Klaatu arrives on Earth inside a glowing sphere, escorted by an enormous, silent robotic guardian called Gort — this time carrying an ultimatum about humanity's environmental destruction rather than its nuclear weapons. As government agents scramble to contain him and astrobiologist Helen Benson tries to understand his true intentions, Klaatu must decide whether a species this reckless with its own planet deserves to survive at all.
Blade Runner 2049
Thirty years after the original, K is a new-model replicant working as a blade runner for the LAPD, retiring older rogue models without complaint — until a routine job unearths a buried secret: evidence that a replicant once gave birth. The discovery could break the wall between the born and the built, and it sends K hunting for a child hidden decades ago, for a vanished blade runner named Deckard, and for an answer about himself he wants too badly to trust.