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.
An infamous hacker called Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) is cornered in an abandoned hotel by police. She easily overpowers and escapes from them, but a group of sinister black-suited Agents with superhuman abilities lead the police in a rooftop pursuit after her. Upon picking up a ringing phone in a telephone booth, she vanishes without a trace.
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.
In 1995, John Connor is ten years old and living in Los Angeles with foster parents. His mother Sarah Connor had been preparing him throughout his childhood for his future role as the leader of the Human Resistance against Skynet, but was arrested after attempting to bomb a computer factory and imprisoned at a mental hospital under the supervision of Dr. Silberman. Skynet sends a new Terminator, designated as T-1000, back in time to kill John. The T-1000 is an advanced prototype composed of a mimetic polyalloy that allows it to take on the shape and appearance of almost anything it touches, and transform parts of its anatomy into knives and other stabbing weapons. The T-1000 arrives under a freeway, kills a policeman and assumes his identity. Meanwhile, the future John Connor has sent back a reprogrammed T-800 (Model 101) Terminator to protect his younger self.
In 2805, Earth is long-abandoned and covered in heaps of garbage leftover from decades of mass consumerism, facilitated by the megacorporation Buy 'n' Large (BnL). Seven hundred years earlier, BnL evacuated Earth's population in fully automated starliners, leaving behind WALL-E trash compactor robots to clean the planet for humanity's eventual return, however the plan failed and all the bots were shut off. Only one WALL-E robot remains active, and has developed sentience after so many years of life-experience. He manages to remain active by repairing himself using parts from other inactive units.
Shinji Ikari, the teenage pilot of a giant Evangelion cyborg, is distraught over the death of his friend Kaworu Nagisa. He visits fellow pilot Asuka Langley Soryu in a hospital and masturbates to her comatose body.
On May 12, 1984, two beings from the year 2029 arrive in Los Angeles: one is a Terminator T-800 Model 101, a cyborg assassin programmed to kill a young woman named Sarah Connor; the other is Kyle Reese, a soldier sent to protect her from the T-800. After the Terminator kills a gang member, a gun-shop manager, the two other women named "Sarah Connor" listed in the telephone directory, Sarah's roommate Ginger, and her partner, it tracks its target to the Technoir, a nightclub. Kyle arrives and saves Sarah from the Terminator. The two steal a car and escape, while the Terminator steals a police car and pursues them.
L'histoire raconte l'aventure de Duck Dodgers à la recherche de « l’Illudium Phosdex ». Cet élément chimique rare, atome constitutif de la crème à raser, ne se trouve plus que sur la mystérieuse « planète X ». Daffy Duck, accompagné de son « Cadet de l'espace » (Porky Pig), fait des recherches sur un tableau et déduit qu'il faut passer par toutes les planètes marquée d'une lettre, et ceci par ordre alphabétique, pour aboutir « naturellement » à cette planète X. Daffy Duck finit par y atterrir. Il en prend possession au nom de la Terre, au moment où Marvin le Martien fait de même au nom de la planète Mars. Les deux champions planétaires vont devoir s’affronter en un combat où la ruse compte encore plus que la force brute. Au cours de leur recherche de la suprématie sur la planète, Daffy et Marvin se menacent chacun d'un pistolet désintégrateur. Quand Marvin tire, il désintègre Daffy en particules atomiques. Mais heureusement Porky le « réintègre » grâce à un pistolet du même nom. Depuis leur vaisseau respectif, Daffy et Marvin s'espionnent ; puis chacun dirige sur l'autre une arme extrêmement destructrice. La planète est peu après complètement détruite, sauf un petit morceau qui flotte dans l'espace et auquel se raccrochent les trois protagonistes. Tandis que Daffy-Duck Dodgers crie victoire, Porky conclut par un désabusé « Oh la belle affaire.
One thousand years have passed since the Seven Days of Fire, an apocalyptic war that destroyed human civilization and gave birth to the vast Toxic Jungle, a forest swarming with giant mutant insects in which everything is lethal to humans. Scattered settlements exist wherever the Toxic Jungle relents, with the Valley of the Wind being one such settlement. The Valley's settlers have a prophecy about a saviour, "clothed in blue robes, descending onto a golden field, to join bonds with the great earth and guide the people to the pure lands at last".
On 16 July 1988, an orb of light destroys Tokyo and World War III begins. Thirty-one years later, in the city of Neo-Tokyo, Shotaro Kaneda has his bōsōzoku gang, the Capsules, battle their rival gang, the Clowns. While there, Kaneda's best friend, Tetsuo Shima, crashes his motorcycle into Takashi, an esper with psychic powers, who had fled from a secret government laboratory with help from a covert operative. Colonel Shikishima, assisted by another esper called Maseru, has Takashi escorted back to his original lodgings and Tetsuo is abducted. When Kaneda and his gang are interrogated, he encounters Kei, a member of the revolutionary group, and arranges her release along with the Capsules.
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.
Filmed in black-and-white with a running time of just under 50 minutes, The War Game depicts the prelude to and the immediate weeks of the aftermath to a Soviet nuclear attack against Britain. A Chinese invasion of South Vietnam starts the war; tensions escalate when the United States authorises tactical nuclear warfare against the Chinese. Although Soviet and East German forces threaten to invade West Berlin if the US does not withdraw that decision, the US does not acquiesce to communist demands and the invasion takes place; two US Army divisions attempt to fight their way into Berlin to counter this, but the Russian and East German forces overwhelm them in conventional battle. In order to turn the tide, the US president authorises the NATO commanders to use their tactical nuclear weapons, and they soon do so. An escalating nuclear war results, during which larger Russian strategic IRBMs are launched at Britain. The film remarks that many Soviet missiles were, at the time, believed to be liquid-fuelled and stored above ground, making them vulnerable to attack, and hypothesises that in any nuclear crisis, the USSR would be obliged to fire all of them as early as possible in order to avoid their destruction by counter-attack, hence the rapid progression from tactical to strategic nuclear exchange.