Lieutenant Colonel Austin Travis leads an unsuccessful raid on a Chechen mafia safe house in Italy by a U.S. Army Special Forces team to recover a stolen Soviet nerve agent, DZ-5. One of his men is killed during the raid.
A French unit on patrol in Vietnam in 1954, during the final year of the First Indochina War, is ambushed by Viet Minh forces. Viet Minh commander Nguyen Huu An orders his soldiers to "kill all they send, and they will stop coming".
Four waves of increasingly deadly attacks have left most of Earth decimated. Against a backdrop of fear and distrust, Cassie is on the run, desperately trying to save her younger brother. As she prepares for the fifth wave, Cassie teams up with a young man who may become her final hope – if she can only trust him.
The film chronicles the Battle of Midway, a turning point in World War II in the Pacific. The Imperial Japanese Navy had been undefeated until that time and out-numbered the American naval forces by four to one.
U.S. Army Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) goes AWOL from his unit and lives among the easy-going and seemingly carefree Melanesian natives in the South Pacific. He is found and imprisoned on a troop carrier by his company First Sergeant, Welsh (Sean Penn), who notices Witt's indifference to the war. The men of C Company, 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division have been brought to Guadalcanal as reinforcements in the campaign to secure Henderson Field and seize the island from the Japanese. As they wait in the holds of a Navy transport, they contemplate their lives and the impending invasion. On deck, battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) talks with his commanding officer, Brigadier General Quintard (John Travolta) about the invasion and its importance. Tall's voice-over reveals that he has been passed over for promotion and this battle may be his last chance to command a victorious operation.
In 1989, Anthony "Swoff" Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) attends or assists to U.S. Marine Corps training before being stationed at Camp Pendleton. Claiming that he joined the military because he "got lost on the way to college", Swofford finds his time at Camp Pendleton difficult, and struggles to make friends. While Swofford feigns illness to avoid his responsibilities, a "lifer", Marine Staff Sergeant Sykes (Jamie Foxx), takes note of his potential and orders Swofford to attend his Scout Sniper course.
Ben Randall (Kevin Costner) is the top rescue swimmer at the United States Coast Guard's Aviation Survival Technician (AST) program. Jake Fischer (Ashton Kutcher) is a hot-shot candidate for AST, who was ranked as a top competitive swimmer in high school with scholarships to every Ivy league college, but he opted to enlist in the Coast Guard. The film's title is introduced by a mythic tale: people lost at sea often claim they feel a presence lifting them to the surface, breathing life into their bodies while they are waiting for help to arrive. They call this presence "The Guardian".
On Saturday, December 13, 1941 at 7:01 a.m., a woman goes swimming somewhere on the California coast, only to find a Japanese submarine surfacing beneath her. The submarine crew believes they have arrived in Hollywood, and the vessel submerges while the woman swims to safety.
On March 19, 2003, Iraqi General Mohammed Al-Rawi (Yigal Naor) meets with his officers and aides in Baghdad to discuss the invasion of Iraq. Al-Rawi decides to wait for the Americans to arrive and offer him a deal.
In the final stages of the Bosnian War in December 1995, United States Navy flight officer Lieutenant Chris Burnett (Owen Wilson) and pilot Lieutenant Jeremy Stackhouse (Gabriel Macht), who are stationed on an aircraft carrier in the Adriatic Sea, are assigned a reconnaissance mission by their commanding officer, Admiral Reigart (Gene Hackman). The mission goes smoothly until they spot suspicious activity in the demilitarized zone where NATO aircraft and the warring factions are prohibited from engaging in military activity. Burnett persuades Stackhouse to fly their F/A-18 Hornet off-course to get a close look and photograph the target. They are unaware that they photographed mass graves, and Serb soldiers see the jet. The local Bosnian Serb paramilitary commander, General Miroslav Lokar (modelled on Arkan and his Tiger militia, and played by Olek Krupa), is conducting a secret genocidal campaign against the local Bosniak population. Not wanting the mass graves to be discovered, Lokar orders the jet be shot down.
Lieutenant A.K. Waters (Bruce Willis) and his U.S. Navy SEAL detachment Zee (Eamonn Walker), Slo (Nick Chinlund), Red (Cole Hauser), Lake (Johnny Messner), Silk (Charles Ingram), Doc (Paul Francis), and Flea (Chad Smith), are sent by Captain Bill Rhodes (Tom Skerritt) to Nigeria to extract a "critical persona", one Dr. Lena Fiore Kendricks (Monica Bellucci), a U.S. citizen by marriage. Their secondary mission is to extract the mission priest (Pierrino Mascarino) and two nuns (Fionnula Flanagan & Cornelia Hayes O'Herlihy).
In the Philippines, a terrorist kills the U.S. ambassador, his son, and dozens of children at an elementary school, using a vehicle-borne IED disguised as an ice cream truck. The mastermind, a Chechen terrorist named Abu Shabal (Jason Cottle), escapes to a training camp in Indonesia. Elsewhere in Costa Rica, two CIA operatives, Walter Ross (Nestor Serrano) and Lisa Morales (Roselyn Sánchez) meet to consolidate intelligence about their target, a drug smuggler named Mikhail "Christo" Troykovich. Christo's men kill Ross and capture Morales, who is imprisoned in a jungle compound and tortured.
Carl Brashear (Gooding, Jr.) leaves his native Kentucky and the life of a sharecropper in 1948 by joining the United States Navy. As a crew member of the salvage ship USS Hoist, where he is assigned to the galley, he is inspired by the bravery of one of the divers, Master Chief Petty Officer Leslie William "Billy" Sunday (De Niro). He is determined to overcome racism and become the first black American Navy diver, even proclaiming that he will become a master diver. He eventually is selected to attend Diving and Salvage School in Bayonne, New Jersey, where he arrives as a boatswain's mate second class. He finds that Master Chief Sunday is the leading chief petty officer and head instructor, who is under orders from the school's eccentric, bigoted commanding officer to ensure that Brashear fails.
During World War II, USMC Cpl. Joseph F. 'Joe' Enders rallies himself to return to active duty with the aid of his pharmacist, Rita. He previously survived a gruesome battle on the Solomon Islands against the Imperial Japanese Army that killed his entire squad and left him with a scar on his neck and almost deaf in his left ear. Enders' new assignment is to protect Navajo code talker Pvt. Ben Yahzee, and carries a promotion for Enders to Sergeant. Sgt. Pete 'Ox' Anderson also receives a parallel assignment protecting Navajo code talker Pvt. Charlie Whitehorse. The Navajo code, as it was known, was a code based on two parts: 1) the Navajo language and 2) a code embedded in the language, meaning that even native speakers would be confused by it, referring to a tank as a turtle, for example. The code was close to unbreakable but also so difficult only a few people could learn it.
In the near future, the United States Navy develops an aviation program to deal with international terrorists and other enemies of the state quickly and quietly, and project controller Captain George Cummings (Sam Shepard) is authorized to develop new technology to achieve these objectives. The project's first brainchild are "F/A-37 Talon" single-seat fighters with impressive payload, speed, and stealth capabilities. Over 400 pilots apply to participate, but only three are chosen: smart hotshot Lieutenant Ben Gannon (Josh Lucas), tomboyish Lieutenant Kara Wade (Jessica Biel), and street-wise, philosophical Lieutenant Henry Purcell (Jamie Foxx). Their first test mission scores 100/100, inflicting maximum casualties with minimum collateral damage.