Mourners gather around an old man (Lugosi) at his wife's grave site as an airliner overhead flies toward Burbank, California. Pilot Jeff Trent and his co-pilot Danny are startled by a bright light, accompanied by a loud noise. They see a flying saucer land in the cemetery near Jeff's house, where two gravediggers are killed by a ghoul (the reanimated wife of the old man). Lost in grief, the old man is struck and killed by a car in front of his home. Mourners at his funeral discover the gravediggers' corpses. When Inspector Daniel Clay and his police officers arrive, Clay goes alone into the cemetery to investigate. Jeff tells his wife, Paula (the old man's granddaughter), about his flying saucer encounter, saying that the Army has sworn him to secrecy. Another saucer lands, and a powerful swooshing noise knocks the Trents, and the police officers in the cemetery, to the ground. Inspector Clay is murdered by the ghoul and her husband's now-reanimated corpse. Lieutenant Harper says: "But one thing's sure. Inspector Clay is dead, murdered, and somebody's responsible!". Newspaper headlines report flying saucer sightings over Hollywood Boulevard, and three of them fly across Los Angeles. In Washington, D.C., the military fires missiles at several saucers. Chief of saucer operations Thomas Edwards says the government has been covering up saucer attacks. The aliens return to their Space Station 7, and Commander Eros tells the alien ruler that he has been unsuccessful in contacting Earth's governments. Eros recommends "Plan 9", the resurrection of recently deceased humans. Concerned about Paula's safety, Jeff urges her to stay with her mother while he's at work, but she refuses. That night, the undead old man breaks into their house and chases Paula outside, where the female ghoul and Inspector Clay join him. Paula escapes, collapsing in the woods while the three ghouls return to Eros in the saucer. At the Pentagon, General Roberts tells Edwards that aliens have been telling the government that they are trying to prevent humanity from destroying the universe. Roberts sends Edwards to San Fernando, where most of the alien activity has occurred. The zombified Inspector Clay goes berserk and attacks Eros, nearly killing him. The ruler approves Eros's Plan 9 to raise armies of the dead to march on Earth's capitals. Edwards and the police interview the Trents, unaware that the flying saucer has returned to the cemetery. Officer Kelton encounters the old man, who chases him into the Trents' backyard. Eros's long-distance ray strikes the old man, reducing him to a skeleton. Edwards, the Trents, and the police drive to the cemetery. Harper insists on leaving Paula in the car; Kelton stays with her. Eros and Tanna (his fellow female alien) send Clay to kidnap Paula and lure the other three humans to the saucer. Seeing its glow, Jeff and the police approach it. Clay knocks Kelton unconscious and carries Paula into the woods. Eros lets Jeff and the police enter the saucer with pistols drawn. He tells them that human weapons development will lead to the discovery of the "solaronite" bomb, a substance that explodes sunlight particles. Such an explosion would set off an uncontrollable chain reaction, destroying the universe. Eros believes that humans are immature and stupid; he intends to destroy humanity, threatening to kill Paula if Jeff and the police try to stop him. Kelton and Larry arrive and see Clay near the saucer carrying the unconscious Paula. They sneak up behind Clay and knock him out with a club. Eros says that Clay's controlling ray has been shut off, which released Paula. He and Jeff have a fistfight inside the ship, and the saucer's equipment is damaged and catches fire. The humans escape, and Tanna and Eros take off. The fire consumes the saucer, which explodes, and the two remaining zombies decompose into skeletons.

By 2025, advancements in medical technology have perfected bio-mechanical organs. The Union corporation sells these expensive "artiforgs" on credit, and when customers fail to pay on time, the company sends "repo men" to forcibly repossess the organ—in which the customer is tased and offered the request of an ambulance, sometimes resulting in the customer's death. Remy and his lifelong friend Jake are the Union's best repo men, but Remy's wife Carol believes his work is a bad influence on their son, Peter. When Remy allows Jake to perform a repossession outside their family barbecue, an angry Carol leaves with Peter. Raiding a "nest" of Union debtors fleeing the country, Remy and Jake impress their boss, Frank, but Remy's mind is made up to transfer to the sales department. Jake arranges one last job—repossessing the heart from a musician Remy admires—but a malfunctioning defibrillator injures Remy, requiring the replacement of his own heart with an artiforg. Carol divorces Remy and he moves in with Jake, but his newfound sympathy for customers leaves him unable to lie as a salesman and unable to dissect deadbeat customers as a repo man. With Remy behind on his heart payments, Jake takes him to another nest with enough artiforgs to clear his debt, but Remy cannot do the job. Jake leaves, and a debtor knocks Remy unconscious. Waking up, Remy rescues Beth, a lounge singer he recognizes, who is suffering from drug use and her numerous unpaid artiforgs. Breaking into the Union office, Remy attempts to clear his and Beth's accounts but is interrupted by Jake, who lets him leave. On the run, Beth and Remy lay low in the city's abandoned outskirts, and Beth reveals that she was forced to buy black market artiforgs after running up severe debts. They begin a relationship, and Remy decides to document his life as a repo man with an old typewriter. Tracked down by Ray, a rival repo man, Remy lures him into falling through a hole in the floor. Beth falls as well, damaging her prosthetic knee, but Remy kills Ray. Remy sneaks into his former workplace, stealing jammers to evade other repo men's organ scanners. He demands that Frank clear his account, only to discover this can now only happen at the Union's central office due to his earlier attempt. Remy and Beth attempt to flee the country at the airport, but security is alerted by bleeding from Beth's knee. A fight ensues, and Jake arrives in time to watch them escape. With help from Beth's associate Asbury, they have Beth's knee replaced by a black-market surgeon. Asbury is killed by Jake, who admits that he rigged the defibrillator to force Remy to stay a repo man by forcing him to get an artificial heart and pay off the debt. Jake then knocks Remy unconscious. Beth awakens Remy and they narrowly escape a Union raid. Briefly subdued by an anti-Union freedom fighter, Remy decides to free all Union customers from debt. He meets Carol and Peter to say goodbye, giving his manuscript to Peter. Remy and Beth kidnap Frank, using him to break into Union headquarters and fight their way to the server room. The server's only interface is an organ scanner, requiring Remy and Beth to cut themselves open to use the scanner internally on each of their artiforgs, clearing their accounts. Frank and Jake access the room, finding Beth near death as Remy attempts to scan her heart. Ordered to kill Remy, Jake kills Frank instead, helps revive Beth, and deposits grenades into the server, destroying the mainframe and wiping the records of every Union customer. Sometime later, Remy enjoys his freedom on a tropical beach with Beth and Jake, and Peter has published his father's manuscript, The Repossession Mambo. However, it is revealed that Remy is actually in a coma, having sustained severe brain damage when Jake knocked him unconscious. Jake has paid off Remy's debt and linked his brain to a neural network, allowing Remy to live out his life peacefully in a computer-generated dream world; their victory over the Union was merely part of this dream. Preparing to deal with an unconscious Beth, Jake says goodbye to Remy, while Frank delivers a sales pitch for the neural network.

In 2031, 17 years after an attempt to stop climate change via stratospheric aerosol injection with the compound CW-7 catastrophically backfired, creating a new ice age that destroyed life on Earth, the remnants of humanity shelter in a state-of-the-art self-sustaining circumnavigational train, the Snowpiercer, run by reclusive transportation magnate Wilford. The passengers on the train are segregated, with the elite in the extravagant front cars and the poor crammed into squalid tail compartments overseen by armed guards. Urged by his mentor Gilliam, Curtis Everett and his second-in-command, Edgar, lead the tail passengers in a revolt. They discover that the guards have no ammunition and overwhelm them, freeing Namgoong Minsoo, a captive security specialist. For his assistance, they bribe him with Kronole, an addictive drug made from industrial waste. Namgoong also insists that his clairvoyant daughter, Yona, be freed. Curtis and his fellow revolutionaries discover that the protein bars they were being fed were made of dead cockroaches. Namgoong helps the tail mob advance, but they face guards armed with melee weapons and overseen by Minister Mason. Edgar is held hostage, but Curtis allows him to be killed to capture Mason, forcing her to order the remaining guards to surrender. The tail mob stays back, holding the guards captive, while Curtis takes Mason, Namgoong, Yona, skilled fighter Grey, and Tanya and Andrew (two parents who had their children taken from them) towards the front of the train. Curtis's group travels through several opulent cars. Namgoong and Yona recognize a landmark outside and speculate that the ice may be thawing more and more with every passing year. The group reaches a schoolroom, where a teacher is indoctrinating the children on Wilford's greatness. A bald man brings eggs for the children to celebrate the train's eighteenth circumnavigation of the Earth. Then the bald man goes to the tail army and shoots them with automatic firearms hidden under the eggs. The captured guards are freed, as is Mason's henchman, Franco. The teacher, who received a gun from the bald man, kills Andrew before Grey kills her. Franco broadcasts to the classroom his execution of Gilliam, which prompts Curtis to execute Mason in turn. Curtis's group moves on, but Franco catches up with them, killing Grey and Tanya. Franco is then seemingly killed by Curtis and Namgoong. In the last compartment before the engine, Namgoong reveals that he collected the Kronole to use it as an explosive to escape the train with Yona, believing they can now survive outside, pointing out the melting ice. Curtis explains that in the early days of the train, the tail section resorted to cannibalism. Edgar was an infant when Curtis killed his mother, and Curtis was going to eat him when Gilliam offered his severed arm instead, stopping the bloodshed. Curtis wants to confront Wilford for causing such horrors. Wilford's assistant, Claude, emerges from behind the engine room door to invite Curtis inside. Curtis meets Wilford and, to his shock, learns that he and Gilliam conspired to stage Curtis's rebellion to reduce the tail section's population to sustainable levels. After ordering the execution of most of the tail section residents, Wilford offers Curtis his position leading the train. Curtis appears ready to accept as Yona overpowers Claude, rushes in, and asks for a match. In desperation, she pulls open a floorboard to reveal Tanya's son, Timmy, who has been enslaved to work as a replacement for a broken machine part. Appalled, Curtis pummels Wilford and rescues Timmy from the machinery, losing his arm in the process. Andy, Andrew's missing son, crawls out of a nook and climbs into the engine core despite Curtis's pleas. Curtis gives Yona the match to light the fuse for the Kronole bomb, while Namgoong fights and kills Franco, who followed them. Damaged by the fighting, the door to the engine room cannot be closed, forcing Curtis and Namgoong to use their bodies to protect Yona and Timmy from the blast. The explosion triggers an avalanche that derails the train and wrecks it. Curtis and Namgoong are unresponsive, so Yona and Timmy escape the wreckage. They see a polar bear in the distance, indicating that life exists outside the train and has not died out, as they were always led to believe.

Dr. Jeremy Stone recounts the events before the United States Senate Committee on Space Sciences in 1971: After a U.S. government satellite crashes near the small rural town of Piedmont, New Mexico, on February 5, nearly all the residents are dead. A military recovery team from Vandenberg Air Force Base sent to recover the satellite dies while trying to do so. Suspecting that the satellite has brought back an alien organism, the military activates an elite team of scientists. Dr. Stone, the team leader, and Dr. Mark Hall, a surgeon, are dropped in by helicopter. They discover the town's doctor opened the satellite in his office and that all of his blood has crystallized into a powder, the same death befalling nearly all of the town. Stone and Hall retrieve the satellite and find two survivors, 69-year-old alcoholic Peter Jackson and six-month-old crying infant Manuel Rios. The elite team also includes Dr. Charles Dutton and Dr. Ruth Leavitt, who join them at a top-secret Nevada underground facility, code named Wildfire. They go through four sub-levels of decontamination procedures, arriving at the fifth sub-level laboratories. If the organism threatens to escape, the Wildfire facility includes an automatic nuclear self-destruct mechanism to incinerate all infectious agents. Under the " odd-man hypothesis ", Dr. Hall is entrusted with the only key that can deactivate the device, the theory being that an unmarried male is the most dispassionate person within a group to make critical decisions in a crisis. Examining the satellite, the team discovers the microscopic alien organism that caused the deaths. The greenish, throbbing life form is assigned the code name "Andromeda." Infecting through the lungs, Andromeda kills biological life almost instantly via a blood clot in the brain and asphyxiation. It appears to be highly virulent. The team studies the organism using animal subjects, an electron microscope, and culturing in various growth media to learn how it behaves. The microbe contains the hydrogen and carbon required for terrestrial life and appears to have a crystalline structure, but lacks the DNA, RNA, proteins, and amino acids present in all forms of terrestrial life, and directly transforms energy to matter with no discernible byproducts. Hall tries to determine why the two Piedmont residents survived. Unknown to the others, Leavitt's research on the germ is impaired by her undisclosed epilepsy. A military jet crashes near Piedmont after the pilot radios that his plastic oxygen mask is dissolving. Hall realizes that the alcoholic Jackson survived because his blood was too acidic from drinking Sterno, and that the baby lived due to his blood being too alkaline from constant crying, suggesting that Andromeda can survive only within a narrow range of blood pH. Just as he has this insight, the organism mutates into a non-lethal form that degrades synthetic rubber and plastic. Andromeda escapes the biocontainment room into the laboratory where Dutton is working. When Andromeda causes all the laboratory's seals to start decaying, a five-minute countdown to nuclear destruction is initiated. Hall rescues Leavitt from an epileptic seizure, triggered by the flashing red lights of Wildfire's alarm system. The team discover that the microbe would thrive on the energy of a nuclear explosion and would consequently be transformed into a super-colony that could destroy all life on Earth. Hall races to reach a functioning station where he can disable the nuclear bomb with his key. He endures multiple attacks by automated lasers as he climbs through the laboratory's central core. He finds a working station, disables the bomb with seconds to spare, and collapses. Hall awakens in a hospital. His colleagues reveal that clouds are being seeded over the Pacific Ocean, which will cause rain to sweep Andromeda from the atmosphere and into alkaline seawater, rendering it harmless. Stone finishes testifying by saying that while they were able to defeat the alien pathogen, they may be unable to do so in the future. The film ends with a computer feed suddenly stopping and the computer flashing the number "601", the Wildfire code for information coming in too fast to analyze.

Team America, an international organization dedicated to counterterrorism, defeats a group of Islamic terrorists in Paris, but are very reckless and destroy the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, and the Louvre in the process. The team includes Lisa, an idealistic psychologist; her love interest, Carson; Sarah, a psychic; Joe, a jock who is in love with Sarah; and Chris, a martial arts expert who harbours a grudge towards actors. Carson proposes to Lisa, but a terrorist kills him in the middle of the act. Team America leader Spottswoode brings Broadway actor Gary Johnston to Team America's base in Mount Rushmore and asks him to use his acting skills to infiltrate a terrorist cell. Unbeknownst to the team, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il is supplying terrorists across the globe with WMDs. Gary infiltrates a terrorist group in Cairo. The team is discovered and a chase ensues, ending with Team America killing the terrorists. However, Cairo is left in ruins, drawing criticism and outrage from the Film Actors Guild (F.A.G.), a union of progressive Hollywood actors led by Alec Baldwin. At Mount Rushmore, Gary tells Lisa that as a child, his acting talent caused his older brother, Tommy, to be brutally killed by gorillas. While the two grow close and have sex, terrorists blow up the Panama Canal in retaliation for the Team America operation in Cairo, killing thousands. The F.A.G. blame this on Team America, while Kim chastises the terrorists for detonating one bomb too early. Gary, feeling his acting talents have again resulted in innocent people dying, resigns from Team America. The remaining members depart for the Middle East and North Africa, but are defeated and captured by North Korean forces while Michael Moore blows up Team America's base in a suicide attack. In North Korea, Kim invites the F.A.G. and world leaders to a peace ceremony, planning to detonate several bombs around the world while they are distracted. Succumbing to depression, Gary is reminded of his responsibility by a rambling speech about "dicks, pussies and assholes" from a drunken tramp. Returning to the team's base, he finds Spottswoode has survived Moore's bombing. After regaining Spottswoode's trust by giving him a blowjob and undergoing one day of training, Gary goes to North Korea, where he uses his acting skills to infiltrate the base and free the team, although Lisa is held hostage by Kim. The team is confronted by the F.A.G. and kill most of their members in an ensuing fight. After Gary uses his acting skills to save Chris from Susan Sarandon, Chris confesses to Gary that the reason he dislikes actors is that he was raped by the cast of the musical Cats when he was 19 years old. The team crashes the peace ceremony, and Gary goes on stage to deliver a recontextualized version of the tramp's speech, arguing that " dicks ", though criticized by " pussies ", are necessary to stop " assholes ", which convinces the world's leaders to unite. Kim betrays and kills Baldwin for being unable to counter Gary's argument, but he is kicked over a balcony by Lisa and impaled on a German delegate's Pickelhaube. Kim reveals his true form as an extraterrestrial cockroach and flees in a spaceship, vowing to return. Gary and Lisa happily begin a relationship and, in the end, the team reunites, preparing to fight the world's terrorists once again.

Theater director Caden Cotard finds his life unraveling. He has mysterious physical ailments and has been growing increasingly alienated from his artist wife, Adele, who creates microscopic paintings. He hits bottom when their couple's therapy fails and Adele leaves him for a new life in Berlin, taking their four-year-old daughter, Olive. After Caden's successful production of Death of a Salesman, he unexpectedly receives a MacArthur Fellowship, giving him the means to pursue a new theatrical project on a gigantic scale. He decides to create a play of brutal realism and honesty that will span years and into which he can pour his whole self. Gathering an ensemble cast into an enormous warehouse in Manhattan's Theater District, he directs a celebration of the mundane, instructing the cast to live out their roles in real time. As the mockup stage inside the warehouse grows increasingly mimetic of the city outside, Caden continues to seek solutions to his personal crises. He is traumatized to discover that Adele has become a world-famous painter in Berlin and has given Olive a full-body tattoo. After a failed attempt at a fling with his box-office employee, Hazel, Caden instead marries a leading actress in his cast, Claire, and has a daughter with her, though reality is blurred as he refers to Olive alone as his "real daughter". His and Claire's relationship fails, and he continues his awkward friendship with Hazel while still harboring feelings for her. Hazel lives in a house that is constantly on fire and filled with smoke. She marries and has her own children, eventually returning to work as Caden's assistant. Meanwhile, an unknown condition is gradually shutting down Caden's autonomic nervous system, so he has to walk with a cane. As the decades pass, the continually expanding warehouse is isolated from the slow decline of the city outside. Caden buries himself ever deeper into his magnum opus, further muddying the line between reality and the world of the play by populating both the cast and crew with doppelgängers. For instance, he hires a man named Sammy to play the role of Caden himself after Sammy reveals that he has been obsessively following Caden for 20 years. (Eventually, a Sammy lookalike is cast as Sammy.) In one scene, Caden is mistaken for Ellen, the housekeeper of his absent first wife Adele's apartment, and he passively takes the role, regularly scrubbing objects in the model of her apartment. In other scenes whose reality is unclear, Caden meets with the adult Olive, who works as an erotic dancer; finally, she demands that he ask forgiveness for abandoning her as she lies on her deathbed as a result of her tattoo becoming infected. He also lives through his parents' deaths and begins a short-lived affair with Hazel's doppelgänger. Sammy begins to romantically pursue Hazel, which sparks a revival of Caden's own relationship with her. This makes Sammy feel spurned. Mirroring an earlier moment where Caden nearly jumped off a building in anguish, Sammy jumps to his death off one of the warehouse's many buildings. Caden and Hazel finally begin a full romantic relationship, but Hazel soon dies of smoke inhalation in her constantly burning house. As Caden becomes ever older and feebler, he continues to push against the limits of his relationships in his work and private lives. One day, the actress he hires to play Adele's housekeeper Ellen offers to take over his role as director so that he can fully commit to the role of Ellen, which relieves him of his many professional duties and stresses. She soon gives him an earpiece that she instructs him to leave in permanently. Through the earpiece, she directs his every move as he lives out his days cleaning Adele's apartment. The actress playing Caden inserts increasing amounts of her own self and personal reflections into Caden's role as Ellen. The world deteriorates into chaos until some unexplained calamity leaves the warehouse in ruins, with the corpses of his cast and crew strewn around the massive set. Eventually, an elderly Caden wakes in the abandoned set of Adele's apartment without any clear sense of where his play begins and his life ends. Following the stage directions from his earpiece, he wanders the ruins of the warehouse, finding within it another warehouse, and another within that, and so on. Finally, Caden prepares to die as he rests his head on the shoulder of an actress who had previously played Ellen's mother, seemingly the only other living person in the warehouse. As the scene fades to gray, Caden says he has a new idea for how to perform the play, but the director's voice in his ear cuts him off with his final cue: "Die".

In 2057, the Sun is dying and Earth is freezing. Eight astronauts aboard the starship Icarus II are sent on a last-chance mission to deliver and detonate a colossal stellar bomb intended to reignite the Sun. As the ship passes Mercury, it receives a distress beacon from Icarus I, the earlier mission that had disappeared seven years prior. Despite engineer Mace's objections, Captain Kaneda, acting on a recommendation from physicist Capa, decides to divert course in order to investigate and also to double the mission's success potential should the identical stellar bomb payload on the original ship prove operational as backup. Navigator Trey plots the new route but inadvertently overlooks realigning the ship's heat shields, damaging reflective panels that protect Icarus II from direct sunlight. Pilot Cassie angles the vessel into Mercury's shadow while Kaneda and Capa perform a spacewalk to repair the shield. The operation destroys two of the ship's communications towers, and reflected light incinerates the oxygen garden, reducing air reserves. When the emergency autopilot forces the ship back into its original alignment, Kaneda orders Capa to retreat and completes the final repair himself, moments before a wave of sunlight engulfs and kills him. Trey blames himself for losing Kaneda, and psychologist Searle sedates him after judging him a suicide risk. Now lacking sufficient oxygen to reach the Sun and deploy the bomb, Icarus II docks with Icarus I to salvage resources. Capa, Searle, Mace and communications officer Harvey board the derelict ship while Cassie and biologist Corazon remain on Icarus II with Trey. Although Icarus I appears largely operational, its mainframe has been sabotaged, preventing payload delivery. Mace finds a damaged entry log from Captain Pinbacker, badly burned and insisting their mission defies God, dated to roughly six and a half years earlier. On the observation deck, Searle discovers the charred bodies of the Icarus I crew, who were apparently exposed to unfiltered solar radiation. An explosive decoupling separates the ships and destroys Icarus I' s outer airlock, stranding the boarding team. With only one intact spacesuit and limited insulation, they decide that Capa, despite Harvey's protests, must take the suit because he is the only crew member able to arm the bomb. Searle stays behind to open the airlock, allowing the others to jettison back toward Icarus II using insulation for protection. Harvey misses the airlock and freezes to death, while Capa and Mace make it back. Left alone on Icarus I, Searle returns to the observation deck and exposes himself to unfiltered sunlight, killing himself. Back aboard Icarus II, Corazon calculates that the remaining oxygen will only sustain four people to the Sun. In order to preserve oxygen, the crew votes to have Mace kill Trey, but Trey has already committed suicide. Although the mission now seems possible, the ship's systems still detect five life signs. Capa investigates and finds Pinbacker alive now aboard Icarus II, having boarded during the docking and caused the decoupling. Pinbacker attacks Capa, traps him in an airlock, disables the ship by lifting its mainframes from coolant baths, and kills Corazon. Mace attempts to manually reset the mainframes, and succeeds with two, but the third crushes his leg and traps him in the coolant; freezing, he urges Capa to finish the mission. Capa pierces an interior hatch with a blowtorch and opens an exterior airlock so decompression tears away the obstruction and frees him, allowing him to deploy the payload. The bomb structure separates from Icarus II, and Capa makes a leap towards the payload as the ship is destroyed by solar radiation. Inside the payload, he finds a wounded Cassie, but Pinbacker confronts them again, claiming he has spent years "speaking to God," and subdues Capa; Cassie pulls Capa away, and he tears burned skin from Pinbacker's arm. As the bomb's gravity shifts, Capa reaches the controls and detonates the payload; in his final moments, spacetime distorts and he reaches out to the Sun's surface as it reignites. On Earth, Capa's sister and her children build snowmen on a frozen Sydney Harbour. As they listen to Capa's final transmission, the sun brightens and sunlight begins to shine down on them.

Jack Hall, a paleoclimatologist for the NOAA, drills for ice-core samples in the Larsen Ice Shelf with his colleagues Frank and Jason. A large portion of the ice shelf splits away, but they manage to escape. At a United Nations conference on global warming in New Delhi, Jack shares his theory that climate change could lead to a new ice age through the disruption of the North Atlantic Current. United States vice president Raymond Becker is dismissive of Jack's research, but Professor Terry Rapson, a Scottish oceanographer, befriends him over their shared concerns. Tokyo is struck by a giant hailstorm, and astronauts from the International Space Station spot three gigantic superstorms above Canada, Europe, and Siberia. Rapson's team notice severe temperature drops from multiple buoys in the North Atlantic, providing evidence for Jack's theory and that a climate shift may already be occurring. Remnants of a hurricane spawn a destructive tornado outbreak over the L.A. Basin. Three helicopters sent to rescue the British royal family from Balmoral Castle crash in Scotland after they fly through the eye of the European superstorm. Jack and Rapson's teams build a forecast model that predicts that the climate shift will occur in 6–8 weeks (later revised to 7–10 days). Rapson shares with Jack that siphoned air from the upper troposphere will flash freeze anything caught in the eye of a cyclone with temperatures below −150 degrees Fahrenheit (−101 degrees Celsius), which caused the royal family helicopter crashes by freezing the fuel on board. In New York City, Jack's son Sam, along with his friends Brian and Laura, participate in an academic decathlon, where they befriend JD. The North American superstorm creates strong winds and rain that flood Manhattan. All transportation halts, stranding the city's population. While helping to rescue two French-speaking tourists, Laura cuts her leg. A massive storm surge inundates the city, forcing Sam's group to seek shelter at the New York Public Library. Sam contacts Jack and his mother Lucy, a pediatrician, through a working payphone. Jack warns Sam of the impending superstorm, urges him to stay inside and warm, promising to rescue him. Rapson and his team succumb to the European storm. Lucy remains in her hospital, caring for bedridden patients, where the authorities eventually rescue them. Per Jack's suggestion, President Blake orders the populations of the southern states to be evacuated to Mexico, while instructing those in the northern areas to shelter-in-place. Jack, Jason, and Frank depart by snowshoe to NYC. While trekking across Pennsylvania, Frank falls through the skylight of a mall covered in snow, only stopped by his tether to Jack and Jason. When more of the skylight begins to crack, he sacrifices himself by cutting the tether. In the library, most survivors decide to move south on the frozen floodwater, despite Sam's warnings. In Mexico, Becker learns that Blake's motorcade perished in the superstorm and that he is now President. Laura develops sepsis from her injury, leading Sam, Brian, and JD to scour an abandoned Russian cargo ship that drifted into the city before the water froze for medical supplies. After finding penicillin, they encounter a pack of escaped wolves from the Central Park Zoo. The boys fight the wolves and return to the library before the eye of the North American superstorm passes over and freezes Manhattan. Jack and Jason barely escape the eye by taking shelter in an abandoned restaurant. Days later, the superstorms dissipate. Jack and Jason reach the library, finding Sam's group alive. Jack sends a radio message to US forces who arrive by helicopter. While being evacuated, other groups of survivors emerge. In his first address as president, Becker apologizes for his ignorance and shares the news of the New York survivors and further rescue missions being carried out. On the International Space Station, astronauts look down in awe at the ice sheets covering much of the Northern Hemisphere and remark that the air has never looked so clear.

A gang of masked criminals rob a mafia -owned bank in Gotham City, betraying and killing each other until the sole survivor, the Joker, reveals himself as the mastermind and escapes with the money. The vigilante Batman, district attorney Harvey Dent, and police lieutenant Jim Gordon ally to eliminate Gotham's organized crime. Batman's true identity, the billionaire Bruce Wayne, publicly supports Dent as Gotham's legitimate protector, believing Dent's success will allow him to retire as Batman and romantically pursue his childhood friend Rachel Dawes —despite her being with Dent. Gotham's mafia bosses gather to discuss protecting their organizations from the Joker, the police, and Batman. The Joker interrupts the meeting and offers to kill Batman for half of the fortune their accountant, Lau, concealed before fleeing to Hong Kong to avoid extradition. With the help of Wayne Enterprises CEO Lucius Fox, Batman finds Lau in Hong Kong and returns him to the custody of the Gotham police. His testimony enables Dent to apprehend the crime families. The bosses accept the Joker's offer, and he kills high-profile targets involved in the trial, including the judge and police commissioner Gillian Loeb. Although Gordon saves the mayor, the Joker threatens that his attacks will continue until Batman reveals his identity. He targets Dent at a fundraising dinner and throws Rachel out of a window, but Batman rescues her. Bruce struggles to understand the Joker's motives, to which his butler Alfred Pennyworth says that "some men just want to watch the world burn." Dent claims he is Batman to lure the Joker out, who attacks the police convoy transporting Dent. Batman and Gordon apprehend the Joker, and Gordon is promoted to commissioner. At the police station, Batman interrogates the Joker, who says he finds Batman entertaining and has no intention of killing him. Having deduced Batman's feelings for Rachel, the Joker reveals she and Dent are being held separately in buildings rigged to explode. Batman races to rescue Rachel while Gordon and the other officers go after Dent, but they discover the Joker has given their positions in reverse. The explosives detonate, killing Rachel and severely burning Dent's face on one side. The Joker escapes custody, extracts the fortune's location from Lau, and burns it, killing Lau in the process. Coleman Reese, a consultant for Wayne Enterprises, deduces and tries to expose Batman's identity, but the Joker threatens to blow up a hospital unless Reese is killed. While the police evacuate hospitals and Gordon struggles to keep Reese alive, the Joker meets with a disillusioned Dent, persuading him to take the law into his own hands and avenge Rachel. Dent defers his decision-making to his now half-scarred, two-headed coin, killing the corrupt officers and the mafia involved in Rachel's death. As panic grips the city, the Joker reveals that two evacuation ferries, one carrying civilians and the other prisoners, are rigged to explode at midnight unless one group sacrifices the other. To the Joker's disbelief, the passengers refuse to kill one another. Batman subdues the Joker but refuses to kill him. Before the police arrest the Joker, he says that although Batman proved incorruptible, his plan to corrupt Dent has succeeded. Dent takes Gordon's family hostage, blaming his negligence for Rachel's death. He flips his coin to decide their fates, but Batman tackles him to save Gordon's son, and Dent falls to his death. Believing Dent is the hero the city needs, and the truth of his corruption will harm Gotham, Batman takes the blame for his death and actions, persuading Gordon to conceal the truth. Alfred burns an undelivered letter from Rachel to Bruce that says she chose Dent, and Fox destroys the invasive surveillance network that helped Batman find the Joker. The city mourns Dent as a hero, and the police launch a manhunt for Batman.

There are three seasoned birders who each set out to achieve a Big Year: Brad Harris, a 36-year-old computer programmer based in Baltimore; Stu Preissler, founder and CEO of a New York company bearing his name; and roofing contractor Kenny Bostick, who holds the current Big Year record of 732 birds. Bostick is obsessively possessive of his record, but his third wife Jessica is concerned; this was supposed to be the year they focused on conceiving a child. She also believes that Bostick's birding obsession is what destroyed his two previous marriages. He is so competitive that the others use his name as a kind of expletive: "Bostick!" Brad is a skilled birder who can identify nearly any species solely by sound, and hates his job maintaining the operational software of a nuclear power plant in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania. Living with his parents after a failed marriage, an aborted career at Dell, and dropping out of grad school, he hopes that doing a Big Year will give him a sense of purpose and possibly even make his father proud of him. Stu is the founder and CEO of an enormous Manhattan-based chemical conglomerate which he built from the ground up, starting in his garage. After decades of corporate success, he is ready to retire to Colorado with his architect wife. Fear of an empty schedule led him to come back from a previous retirement, but now he wants to leave his company in the hands of his two lieutenants. The company is in the middle of complicated negotiations to merge with a competitor, so his two anointed successors keep calling him back to New York for important meetings. To some extent, he is a prisoner of his own success. A Big Year has been his lifelong dream and he's pursuing it with the full support of his wife. The movie portrays various incidents that take place during the Big Year event, while the trio compete with each other and many other birders to achieve the world record of sighting the highest number of birds. Brad and Stu become friends and help each other in the competition, and Brad is attracted to a fellow birder, Ellie. Meanwhile, the highly competitive Bostick resorts to dirty tricks to boost his own count while undermining the others. As the year draws to a close, Stu is happily retired and enjoying his newborn grandson; Brad develops a relationship with Ellie; and Bostick is alone, as his wife has left him. Stu and Brad, now close friends, congratulate each other on "a very big year", after each sighting 700+ bird species that year. When the Big Year results are published, Bostick won the competition with 755, a new record; Brad came in second; Stu was fourth. Brad opines that "he (Bostick) got more birds, but we got more everything," as he looks at Ellie, who has come for a weekend visit. Stu smiles, looking at his wife. The film ends with Brad and Ellie birding together on a rocky coastline, while Brad confesses that birding is no longer the biggest part of his life. Stu is hiking with his toddler grandson (already enamored by birds) in the Rockies. Bostick is on a birding adventure in China, alone and gazing wistfully at a happy couple walking with their newborn child.

In a distant future, water is so scarce and rationed that it is considered an immensely valuable substance, both as a commodity and as a currency in ice cubes. The Templars of Mithra control the water and they destroy worlds that have natural water, leaving the galaxy virtually dry. Pirates dedicate their lives to raiding ships and looting the ice from the cargo holds to make a living. Jason is the leader of a band of pirates that raid a Templar cruiser for its ice, and discover the beautiful princess Karina in a stasis pod. He decides to kidnap her, waking her up, and alarming the Templars. Jason and his pirates flee, but are pursued by Templar ships. Jason lets some of his crew, Maida and Zeno, escape while Roscoe stays to help Jason. Both Jason and Roscoe are captured. After their capture, they meet Killjoy on their way to become slaves but first they will be 'redesigned': castrated and lobotomized. As Roscoe and Jason are shuffled into the processing facility, Killjoy walks past in a stolen monk's habit as priests are spared "just in case". Our heroes are spared this fate, however, when Princess Karina intervenes and purchases them as her slaves, having them work as servants. That evening, they are reunited with Killjoy (disguised as a robot). Jason, Karina, Roscoe, Killjoy, Karina's servant Nanny and her robot butler Percy manage to leave the planet before the Supreme Commander arrives to arrest her. Princess Karina hires Jason so she can find her father, who has gone missing while searching for the so-called "Seventh World": a lost, mythic planet rumored to contain vast reserves of water. The existence of such a world would threaten the Templars' water monopoly, and therefore their hold on power. The Supreme Commander of the Templars orders Zorn to pursue Princess Karina in order to locate the Seventh World for the Templars. At some point, Jason keeps a secret that a nasty creature is hiding in their spaceship. Later, they are about to eat a turkey when the creature bursts out of it and runs away. On their next planet, Jason and Roscoe are reunited with their fellow pirates, Maida and Zeno. They proceed to locate the "lost" planet, which contains massive amounts of water and is protected by a time-distortion field. The planet must be approached on a specific course or the ship will be lost in time forever. As the heroes' ship enters the distortion field, Zorn pursues and attacks them with a host of Templars and robots. This results in a climactic battle as time randomly speeds up and everyone quickly ages into extreme old age. In the end, the day is saved by the now-adult son of Karina and Jason, the result of a romantic tryst just before entering the time distortion field. As the heroes exit the field, everyone's ages regress to what they originally were, leaving Jason and Karina with the knowledge that they will have a child together. The Templar ship has disappeared as it veered off the designated course during the attack and has now become lost in time for eternity. The crew looks on as they approach the Seventh World, which is revealed to be Earth.

In 1920's Los Angeles, stuntman Roy Walker is hospitalized, bedridden and paraplegic (possibly permanently) after jumping off a bridge for a stunt for a film. He meets Alexandria, a young Romanian -born patient in the hospital who is recovering from a broken arm, and tells her a story about her namesake, Alexander the Great. Roy promises to tell her an epic tale if she returns the next day. The next morning, as Roy spins his tale of fantasy, Alexandria's imagination brings his characters to life. Roy's tale is about five heroes: a silent Indian warrior, a bow and arrow-wielding ex- slave named Otta Benga, Italian explosives expert Luigi, Charles Darwin alongside a pet monkey named Wallace, and a masked swashbuckling bandit. The evil ruler Governor Odious has committed an offense against each of the five, and they all seek revenge. They are later joined by a sixth hero, a mystic. Alexandria vividly imagines people around her appearing as the characters in Roy's story. Although Roy develops affection for Alexandria, he has an ulterior motive: to trick her into stealing morphine from the hospital pharmacy. He intends to use the morphine to die by suicide because the woman he loves has left him for the actor for whom he provided the stunt footage. However, Alexandria brings him only three pills; she threw away the rest, having mistaken the "E" Roy wrote in "morphine" for a "3". The story becomes a collaborative tale to which Alexandria also contributes. The masked bandit, whom Roy intended to represent Alexandria's late father, becomes Roy, and Alexandria is his daughter. Roy talks Alexandria into stealing a bottle of pills locked in a fellow patient's cabinet, and then downs the contents. As he falls asleep he attempts to finish the story with the Bandit finding love, and he tells Alexandria not to return the next day. She does not obey, and is devastated to see a dead patient being taken away; however, the deceased is Roy's elderly, denture -wearing roommate. Roy awakens and lashes out when he realizes the pills were placebos. Alexandria, desperate to help Roy, sneaks out of bed to the pharmacy. She climbs onto the cabinet but loses her footing, falls, and sustains a severe head injury. She receives surgery, after which she is visited by Roy, who confesses his deception. He pleads with Alexandria to ask someone else to end the story, but she insists on hearing Roy's ending. Roy reluctantly and drunkenly continues the story. The heroes are betrayed and die one by one, and it seems that Governor Odious will be triumphant. Alexandria becomes increasingly upset, but Roy insists that it is his story to tell and the Bandit is a coward. She declares that it is hers too and begs Roy to let the Bandit live. Roy finally agrees, and the epic tale comes to an end; Governor Odious lays dying and the Bandit and his daughter are alive and together. In a final twist, Roy confronts the character representing his ex-girlfriend. She says the story's pain and suffering were all part of a "test" of the Bandit's love for her. The Bandit rejects her and her manipulations at last. With the story complete, Roy and Alexandria, along with the patients and staff of the hospital, watch the finished film that Roy appeared in, a Western featuring bandits, a Native American man, and Roy's ex-girlfriend. The crowd is delighted, but Roy's smile is broken in disappointment as he realizes his stunt has been cut from the film. Alexandria's arm eventually heals and she returns to the orange orchard where her family works. Her voice-over reveals that she believes Roy has recovered and is now back at work again. A montage of cuts from several of silent films ' greatest and most dangerous stunts plays; she imagines all the stuntmen to be Roy.