United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) is commander of Burpelson Air Force Base, which houses the Strategic Air Command 843rd Bomb Wing, equipped with B-52 bombers. The 843rd is currently in-flight on airborne alert, a few hours from the Soviet border.
A man (Davos Hanich) is a prisoner in the aftermath of World War III in post-apocalyptic Paris where survivors live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. Scientists research time travel, hoping to send test subjects to different time periods "to call past and future to the rescue of the present". They have difficulty finding subjects who can mentally withstand the shock of time travel. The scientists eventually settle upon the prisoner; his key to the past is a vague but obsessive memory from his pre-war childhood of a woman (Hélène Chatelain) he had seen on the observation platform ("the jetty") at Orly Airport shortly before witnessing a startling incident there. He had not understood exactly what happened but knew he had seen a man die.
The film begins with VIPs visiting the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) at Offutt AFB in Omaha, Nebraska. During the trip, an alert is initiated by USAF's early warning radar that an unidentified flying object is making an unauthorized intrusion into American airspace. Defense protocols dictate that the SAC must always keep several bomber groups airborne 24 hours a day in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. Following the alert, bombers are ordered to proceed to predetermined aerial "fail-safe points" to await their final "go" orders before proceeding towards Soviet targets.
A deadly virus wipes out almost all of humanity in 1996, forcing remaining survivors to live underground. In 2027, James Cole (Willis) is a prisoner living in a subterranean shelter beneath the streets of Philadelphia. Cole is selected for a mission, where he is trained and sent back in time to collect information on the virus in order to help scientists develop a cure. Meanwhile, Cole is troubled by recurring dreams involving a foot chase and an airport shooting.
Astronauts Taylor (Charlton Heston), Landon (Robert Gunner), Dodge (Jeff Burton) and Stewart are in deep hibernation when their spaceship crashes in a lake on an unknown planet after a long near-light speed voyage, during which, due to time dilation, the crew ages only 18 months. As the ship sinks, Taylor finds Stewart dead and her body desiccated. They throw an inflatable raft from the ship and climb down into it; before departing the ship, Taylor notes that the date is November 25, AD 3978, approximately two millennia after their departure in 1972. Once ashore, Dodge performs a soil test and pronounces the soil incapable of sustaining life.
Young Sheffield residents Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher) and Jimmy Kemp (Reece Dinsdale) decide to marry due to an unplanned pregnancy. Meanwhile, as tensions between the US and the Soviet Union over Iran escalate, the Home Office directs Sheffield City Council to assemble an emergency operations team, which establishes itself in a makeshift bomb shelter in the basement of the Town Hall. After an ignored US ultimatum to the Soviets results in a brief tactical nuclear skirmish, Britain is gripped by fear, with looting and rioting erupting. "Known subversives" (including peace activists and some trade unionists) are arrested and interned under the Emergency Powers Act.
The film opens on the birthday of Alexander (Erland Josephson), an actor who gave up the stage to work as a journalist, critic, and lecturer on aesthetics. He lives in a beautiful house with his actress wife Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), stepdaughter Marta (Filippa Franzén), and young son, "Little Man", who is temporarily mute due to a throat operation. Alexander and Little Man plant a tree by the sea-side, when Alexander's friend Otto, a part-time postman, delivers a birthday card to him. When Otto asks, Alexander mentions that his relationship with God is "nonexistent". After Otto leaves, Adelaide and Victor, a medical doctor and a close family friend who performed Little Man's operation, arrive at the scene and offer to take Alexander and Little Man home in Victor's car. However, Alexander prefers to stay behind and talk to his son. In his monologue, Alexander first recounts how he and Adelaide found this lovely house near the sea by accident, and how they fell in love with the house and surroundings, but then enters a bitter tirade against the state of modern man. As Tarkovsky wrote, Alexander is weary of "the pressures of change, the discord in his family, and his instinctive sense of the threat posed by the relentless march of technology"; in fact, he has "grown to hate the emptiness of human speech".
Eight years after Harvey Dent's (Aaron Eckhart) death, the Dent Act grants the Gotham City Police Department powers which nearly eradicate organized crime. Feeling guilty for covering up Dent's crimes, Police Commissioner James Gordon (Gary Oldman) writes a resignation speech confessing the truth but decides not to use it. Batman has disappeared, and Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has become a recluse. Cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) obtains Bruce's fingerprints from his home, kidnaps a congressman, then disappears. Selina hands Bruce's fingerprints to Phillip Stryver (Burn Gorman), an assistant to Bruce's business rival John Daggett (Ben Mendelsohn), in hope of having her criminal record erased. Stryver double-crosses Selina, but she uses the congressman's stolen phone to alert the police to their location. Gordon and the police arrive to find the congressman, and then pursue Stryver's men into the sewers while Selina flees. A masked militant named Bane (Tom Hardy) captures Gordon. Gordon escapes and is found by John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a once-orphaned patrol officer who has deduced Batman's true identity from their similar backgrounds. Gordon promotes Blake to detective, with Blake reporting directly to him.
Hiroshima mon amour concerns a series of conversations (or one enormous conversation) over a 36-hour long period between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva), referred to as She, and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada), referred to as He. They have had a brief relationship, and are now separating. The two debate memory and forgetfulness as She prepares to depart, comparing failed relationships with the bombing of Hiroshima and the perspectives of people inside and outside the incidents. The early part of the film recounts, in the style of a documentary but narrated by the so far unidentified characters, the effects of the Hiroshima bomb on August 6, 1945, in particular the loss of hair and the complete anonymity of the remains of some victims. He had been conscripted into the Japanese army and his family was in Hiroshima on that day.
The story is set in the early 1970s, ten years in the future at the time of the film's 1964 release, and the Cold War is still a problem (in the 1962 book, the setting was May 1974). U.S. President Jordan Lyman has recently signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, and the subsequent ratification has produced a wave of public dissatisfaction, especially among the President's opposition and the military, who believe the Soviets cannot be trusted.
The film moves between Shizuma Shigematsu's journal entries about Hiroshima in 1945, following the dropping of the atomic bomb, and the present, 1950, when Shigematsu and his wife Shigeko are the guardians for their niece Yasuko and charged with finding her a husband (she has been declined three times due to concerns over her having been in the "black rain" fallout). As the story progresses, Shigematsu sees more and more fellow hibakusha, his friends and family, succumbing to radiation sickness and Yasuko's prospects for marriage become more and more unlikely, as she forms a bond with a poor man named Yuichi, who carves jizo and suffers a form of post-traumatic stress disorder where he attacks passing motor vehicles as "tanks."
The film does not have a single narrative, but is rather episodic in nature, following the adventures of a "surrogate Kurosawa" (often recognizable by his wearing Kurosawa's trademark hat) through eight different segments, or "dreams", each one titled.
James and Hilda Bloggs are a retired couple living in a tidy isolated cottage in rural Sussex in southeast England. James frequently travels to London to read the newspapers and keep abreast of the deteriorating international situation; while frequently misunderstanding some specifics, he is fully aware of the growing risk of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. James is horrified at a radio news report stating that a war may be only three days away, and sets about preparing for the worst as instructed by his government-issued Protect and Survive pamphlets. As Hilda continues her daily routine, and their son Ron dismisses such preparations as pointless (referencing the song "We'll All Go Together When We Go" by Tom Lehrer), James builds a lean-to shelter inside their home (which he consistently calls the "inner core or refuge" per the pamphets) and prepares a stock of supplies. He also follows through seemingly strange instructions such as painting his windows with white paint and readying sacks to lie down in when a nuclear strike hits. Despite James' concerns, he and Hilda are confident they can survive the war, as they did World War II in their childhoods, and that a Soviet defeat will ensue.
The plot is set in a town after a nuclear war, which was caused by a computer error and the failure of the operator to prevent the missile launch — he noticed the mistake, but choked on coffee and was not able to shout respective commands in time. The town is destroyed and polluted with radioactive elements. Police curfew is established in the immediate vicinity and only healthy people are selected for admittance to the underground bunkers. The main character, played by Rolan Bykov, is a Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, who tries to survive and helps a small group of children and adults survive by staying with them in the basement of the former museum of history. He survives by writing letters in his mind to his son Eric, though it is obvious that they will never be read. The main character is very disappointed that science has led to such a disaster. Many die from the radiation. He escapes the safe bunker, returning to the dying abandoned children, taking care of them for some time and giving them hope. Eventually he dies as well. The film ends with children wandering through the uninhabited landscape, their future uncertain.
When the Japanese freighter Eiko-maru is destroyed near Odo Island, the Bingo-maru is sent to investigate, only to meet the same fate with few survivors. A fishing boat from Odo is also destroyed, with one survivor. Fishing catches mysteriously drop to zero, blamed by an elder on the ancient sea creature known as "Godzilla". Reporters arrive on Odo Island to further investigate. A villager tells one of the reporters that "something large is going crazy down there" ruining the fishing. That evening, a ritual dance to appease Godzilla is held during which the reporter learns that the locals used to sacrifice young girls. That night, a large storm strikes the island, destroying the reporters' helicopter, and an unseen force destroys 17 homes, kills nine persons and 20 of the villagers' livestock.