In a European village Henry Frankenstein, a young scientist, and his assistant Fritz, a hunchback, piece together a human body, the parts of which have been collected from various sources. Frankenstein desires to create human life through electrical devices which he has perfected.
In 2034, two years after the events of 2nd GIG, Public Security Section 9 is investigating a string of mysterious suicides by refugees from the Siak Republic. Chief Aramaki conducts a raid to arrest the refugee dictator only to find him already dead. In retaliation, a Siak operative plans a terrorist attack with a micromachine virus. Batou is sent to intercept the Siak operative and encounters Kusanagi, who is conducting her own investigation. Before they can apprehend the operative, he dies while attacking them. Kusanagi takes a case of virus ampules and warns Batou to stay away from the Solid State Society before leaving.
In "the not-too-distant future", eugenics is common. A genetic registry database uses biometrics to classify those so created as "valids" while those conceived by traditional means and more susceptible to genetic disorders are known as "in-valids". Genetic discrimination is illegal, but in practice genotype profiling is used to identify valids to qualify for professional employment while in-valids are relegated to menial jobs.
In April 2054, Washington, D.C. has a special police force called PreCrime that stops murderers before they act. Murders are predicted using three Precogs, mutated humans who "previsualize" crimes by receiving visions of the future. Over the past six years, PreCrime has successfully reduced the city's murder rate to zero, and the Federal government is on the verge of adopting it, even though the public finds it controversial. Captain John Anderton (Tom Cruise), the head of PreCrime, has been suffering from drug addiction since the unresolved disappearance of his son, Sean, which led to his wife, Lara (Kathryn Morris), divorcing him. With PreCrime poised to go nationwide, the system is being audited by Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell), an agent from the United States Department of Justice. In the middle of the audit, the Precogs generate a new prediction, one saying that Anderton will murder a man named Leo Crow in thirty-six hours. Anderton does not know Crow, but flees the area as Witwer begins a manhunt.
Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), a brilliant but eccentric scientist, meets Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), a journalist for Particle magazine, at a meet-the-press event held by Bartok Science Industries, the company that provides funding for Brundle's work. Seth takes Veronica back to the warehouse that serves him as both home and laboratory, and shows her a project that will change the world: a set of "Telepods" that allows instantaneous teleportation of an object from one pod to another. Brundle convinces Veronica to keep the project's existence quiet in exchange for exclusive rights to the story, and she begins to document his work. Although the Telepods can transport inanimate objects, they do not work properly on living things, as is demonstrated when a live baboon is turned inside-out during an experiment.
The plot-summaries of the shorts are listed below in the order that they run in the DVD release, which is not the chronological order. Chronologically, the order would be:
In a dystopian near-future, Detroit, which is now bankrupt and overrun with crime, gives Omni Consumer Products (OCP) control of its struggling police force. The company plans to replace the poor, run-down sections of Old Detroit with the high-end "Delta City," but must first address the city's high crime rate. As an alternative to existing law enforcement, OCP senior president Dick Jones (Ronny Cox) offers the prototype ED-209 enforcement droid, but it accidentally kills a board member during a demonstration. The OCP chairman, nicknamed "The Old Man" (Dan O'Herlihy), decides instead to back Jones' young rival, Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer), and his experimental cyborg police officer program, "RoboCop.
Will Rodman, a scientist at the biotechnology company Gen-Sys, is testing viral-based drug ALZ-112 on chimpanzees to find a cure for brain ailments such as Alzheimer's disease. The drug is given to a chimpanzee, Bright Eyes, greatly increasing her intelligence. However, when Will is presenting 112 to his boss and uses Bright Eyes as an example, she is forced from her cage, goes on a rampage, and is killed. Will's boss Steven Jacobs terminates the project and orders chimp handler Robert Franklin to euthanize the chimps. After doing as ordered, Franklin discovers that Bright Eyes had recently given birth and understands the reason why she was disturbed. He convinces Will to save the baby chimp's life by taking him home temporarily. Will's father Charles, who is suffering from Alzheimer's, names the chimp "Caesar", in reference to William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, from which he can, despite his deteriorating mental condition, cite long passages from memory. Will learns that Caesar has inherited his mother's high intelligence (the 112 virus passing to him in utero) and decides to raise him, working from home and observing his behavior in hopes that he can get the project restarted. Three years later, Will introduces Caesar to the redwood forest at Muir Woods National Monument. Meanwhile, with Charles' condition rapidly deteriorating, Will treats him with ALZ-112 and he is restored to better-than-original cognitive ability.
Ten years after the worldwide pandemic of the deadly ALZ-113 virus (known as the Simian Flu), human civilization is completely destroyed following martial law, civil unrest and the economic collapse of every country in the world. Over 90% of the human population has died in the pandemic, while apes with genetically enhanced intelligence have started to build a civilization of their own.
In 2084, Earthbound construction worker Douglas Quaid is having troubling dreams about Mars and a mysterious woman there. His wife Lori dismisses the dreams and discourages him from thinking about Mars, where the governor, Vilos Cohaagen, is fighting rebels while searching for a rumored alien artifact located in the mines. At "Rekall", a company that provides memory implants of vacations, Quaid opts for a memory trip to Mars as a secret agent fantasy. However, during the procedure, before the memory is implanted, something goes wrong, and the story diverges between the question of what is real and what is hallucination. Apparently, Quaid starts revealing previously suppressed memories of actually being a secret agent. The company sedates him, wipes his memory of the visit, and sends him home. On the way home, Quaid is attacked by his friend Harry and some construction coworkers; he is forced to kill them, revealing elite fighting-skills. He is then attacked in his apartment by Lori, who reveals that she was never his wife; their marriage was just a false memory implant and Cohaagen sent her as an agent to monitor Quaid. He is then attacked and pursued by armed thugs led by Richter, Lori's real husband and Cohaagen's operative.
Peter Parker struggles to balance his crime-fighting duties as Spider-Man with the demands of his normal life. He loses a job, faces financial difficulties, and struggles to attend his physics lectures at Columbia University on time. Estranged from both love interest Mary Jane Watson and best friend Harry Osborn, who intends to seek revenge on Spider-Man for his father Norman's death, Peter additionally discovers his Aunt May is facing foreclosure.
Three years after the events of the first movie, Noa Izumi and Asuma Shinohara are now testing new Labors at a facility run by the Metropolitan Police. Isao Ota is a police academy Labor instructor. Mikiyasu Shinshi has since been reassigned as the Tokyo Metropolitan Police's head of General Affairs. Seitaro Sakaki has retired with Shigeo Shiba taking over his position as head of the labor maintenance team with Hiromi Yamazaki, Kiichi Goto and Shinobu Nagumo remaining with the unit as Kanuka Clancy had permanently returned to New York. Most of them had been replaced by fresh labor pilots.
Kenji Koiso (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a young student at Kuonji High School with a gift in mathematics and a part-time moderator in the massive computer-simulated virtual reality world OZ along with his friend Takashi Sakuma (Takahiro Yokokawa).
High-school senior Peter Parker visits a genetics laboratory with his friend Harry Osborn and love interest, Mary Jane Watson for a school field trip. There, Peter is bitten on the hand by a genetically engineered "super spider". Shortly after arriving home to his Aunt May and Uncle Ben, he goes unconscious. Meanwhile, Harry's father, scientist Norman Osborn, owner of Oscorp, is attempting to preserve his company's critically important military contract. He experiments on himself with a new but unstable performance-enhancing chemical vapor that increases his speed, strength, and stamina. However, it also drives him insane and he kills his assistant, Mendel Stromm. The next morning, Peter finds that his previously impaired vision has improved and his body has metamorphosized into a more muscular physique. At school, he finds that his body can produce webs and his quickened reflexes let him avoid injury during a confrontation with bully Flash Thompson. Peter discovers he has developed superhuman speed, strength, the ability to stick to surfaces, and a heightened ability to sense danger.
The story is loosely based on Ghost in the Shell manga chapter "Robot Rondo" (with elements of "Phantom Fund"). Opening in 2032, Public Security Section 9 cybernetic operative Batou is teamed with Togusa, an agent with very few cybernetic upgrades, following the events of Ghost in the Shell.