USA
countryAmerican science fiction cinema, from Golden Age B-pictures to modern blockbusters.
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.
The Thing from Another World
An Air Force crew and a team of Arctic researchers uncover a flying saucer buried in the ice — and, frozen a short distance away, its pilot. When their attempt to thaw the block of ice for study goes wrong, an eight-foot alien plant-based organism with a taste for blood is loose in the isolated research station, and there is nowhere in the frozen dark for anyone to run.
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.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
A small-town doctor returns home to find his patients insisting their loved ones aren't quite themselves anymore — subtly wrong, emotionally flat, somehow replaced. He soon discovers the horrifying truth: alien seed pods are growing perfect physical duplicates of the townspeople while they sleep, replacing them one by one with copies that look identical but feel nothing at all.
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.
The Omega Man
Two years after a biological war wipes out nearly all of humanity, Dr. Robert Neville believes he may be the last normal man alive in Los Angeles — immunized by an experimental serum while everyone else either died or mutated into a nocturnal, light-sensitive, quasi-religious cult calling itself The Family. By day, Neville scavenges an empty city and hunts his enemies; by night, he barricades himself inside his fortified apartment and waits for dawn.
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.
Westworld
At Delos, a luxury resort populated entirely by lifelike androids, wealthy guests live out fantasies in perfectly recreated Western, medieval and Roman worlds — free to gunfight, romance, or duel robotic hosts programmed to lose every time. When a software failure begins spreading through the park's systems, the hosts stop following the script, and a implacable, silent Gunslinger android starts hunting a guest for real.
Logan's Run
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.
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.
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.
Escape from New York
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.
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.
The Thing
An American research station in Antarctica takes in a dog fleeing a Norwegian helicopter crew trying to kill it. The dog is not a dog. It is something that imitates — perfectly, cell by cell — and by the time the twelve men understand that, any of them could already be it.
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.
The Terminator
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.
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.
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.
GemThey Live
A drifter looking for work in Los Angeles finds a box of sunglasses that reveal the truth: the billboards say OBEY, the money says THIS IS YOUR GOD, and the ruling class are skull-faced aliens running Earth as a third-world franchise. He responds the only way an American hero can — with a shotgun and a one-liner.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.