Dom Cobb and Arthur are "extractors" who perform corporate espionage using experimental dream-sharing technology to infiltrate their targets' subconscious and extract information. Their latest target, Saito, is impressed with Cobb's ability to layer multiple dreams within each other. He offers to hire Cobb for the ostensibly impossible job of implanting an idea into a person's subconscious; performing "inception" on Robert Fischer, the son of Saito's competitor Maurice Fischer, with the idea to dissolve his father's company. In return, Saito promises to clear Cobb's criminal status, allowing him to return home to his children. Cobb accepts the offer and assembles his team: a forger named Eames, a chemist named Yusuf, and a college student named Ariadne. Ariadne is tasked with designing the dream's architecture, something Cobb himself cannot do for fear of being sabotaged by his mind's projection of his late wife, Mal. Maurice Fischer dies, and the team sedates Robert Fischer into a three-layer shared dream on an airplane to America bought by Saito. Time on each layer runs slower than the layer above, with one member staying behind on each to perform a music-synchronized " kick " (using the French song " Non, je ne regrette rien ") to awaken dreamers on all three levels simultaneously. The team abducts Robert in a city on the first level, but unknown to any team member, his subconscious projections, trained to anticipate such a scenario, attack them. After Saito is wounded, Cobb reveals that while dying in the dream would usually awaken dreamers, Yusuf's sedatives will instead send them into " Limbo ": a world of infinite subconscious. Eames impersonates Robert's godfather, Peter Browning, to introduce the idea of an alternate will to dissolve the company. Cobb explains to Ariadne that he and Mal entered Limbo while experimenting with dream-sharing, experiencing fifty years in one night due to the time dilation with reality. After waking up, Mal still believed she was dreaming. Attempting to "wake up," she committed suicide and framed Cobb for her murder to force him to do the same. Cobb fled the U.S., leaving his children behind. Yusuf drives the team around the first level as they are sedated into the second level, a hotel dreamed by Arthur. Cobb persuades Robert that Browning has kidnapped him to stop the dissolution and that Cobb is a defensive projection, leading Robert to another third level deeper as part of a ruse to enter Robert's subconscious. In the third level, the team infiltrates an alpine fortress with a projection of Maurice inside, where the inception itself can be performed. However, Yusuf performs his kick too soon by driving off a bridge, forcing Arthur and Eames to improvise a new set of kicks synchronized with them hitting the water by rigging an elevator and the fortress, respectively, with explosives. Mal then appears and kills Robert before he can be subjected to the inception; he and Saito are subsequently lost in Limbo, forcing Cobb and Ariadne to rescue them in time for Robert's inception and Eames's kick. Cobb reveals that during their time in Limbo, Mal refused to return to reality; Cobb had to convince her it was only a dream, accidentally incepting in her the belief that the real world was still a dream. Cobb makes peace with his part in Mal's death. Ariadne kills Mal's projection and wakes Robert up with a kick. Revived into the third level, Robert discovers the planted idea: his dying father telling him to create something for himself. While Cobb searches for Saito in Limbo, the others ride the synced kicks back to reality. Cobb finds an aged Saito and reminds him of their agreement. The dreamers all awaken on the plane, and Saito makes a phone call. Arriving in Los Angeles, Cobb passes the immigration checkpoint, and his father-in-law accompanies him to his home. Cobb uses Mal's "totem" – a top that spins indefinitely in a dream – to test if he is indeed in the real world, but he chooses not to observe the result and instead joins his children.

In 1999, in an unnamed city, Thomas Anderson, a computer programmer known as " Neo " in hacking circles, investigates the mystery of the "Matrix", bringing him to the attention of hacker Trinity. She tells him that Morpheus can answer Neo's questions. At his workplace, Neo is pursued by Agents led by Agent Smith, while Morpheus, able to somehow observe their movements, guides him by phone, but Neo ultimately surrenders. The Agents interrogate Neo about Morpheus, but he refuses to cooperate. In response, they seal his mouth shut and implant a robotic tracking device in his abdomen. Neo awakens at home, believing the encounter was a nightmare until Trinity and her companions remove the device and take him to Morpheus. Morpheus offers Neo a choice: a red pill to uncover the truth about the Matrix or a blue pill to return to his normal life. Neo takes the red pill and awakens in the real world, submerged in a mechanical pod and connected to invasive cables. He sees countless humans similarly encased and tended by machines before he is ejected from the building and rescued by Morpheus aboard the hovercraft Nebuchadnezzar. Morpheus reveals that the year is approximately 2199. In the 21st century, humanity lost a war against its artificially intelligent creations, leaving Earth a devastated ruin. Humans blackened the sky to deprive the machines of solar power, but the machines retaliated by creating vast fields of artificially grown humans, harvesting their bioelectric energy. To keep their captives pacified, they built the Matrix, a simulated reality modeled on human civilization at its peak. The remaining free humans founded an underground refuge called Zion, surviving on scarce resources. Morpheus and his crew hack into the Matrix to liberate others, exploiting its rules to gain superhuman abilities inside it. Even so, they remain outmatched by the Agents—sentient programs that protect the system—and death in the Matrix means death in the real world. Morpheus freed Neo because he believed him to be "the One", a prophesied figure destined to free humanity. The crew enters the Matrix to seek guidance from the Oracle, who foretold of the One. She implies that Neo is not the One and warns him of an imminent choice between his life and Morpheus's. The crew is ambushed by Agents after being betrayed by Cypher, a disillusioned crew member who longs to return to the virtual comforts of the Matrix. Convinced of Neo's importance, Morpheus sacrifices himself to confront Smith and is captured. Meanwhile, Cypher exits the Matrix and begins disconnecting the others, killing them. Before he can kill Neo and Trinity, he is killed by Tank, a wounded crew member, who extracts the survivors. Smith interrogates Morpheus to obtain access codes for Zion's mainframe, which would enable the machines to destroy the human resistance. Determined to rescue Morpheus, Neo re-enters the Matrix with Trinity. They free Morpheus, who escapes the Matrix with Trinity, but Smith intercepts Neo. Realizing his potential, Neo fights Smith as an equal and kills him. However, Smith resurrects in a new body and kills Neo. In the real world, machines called Sentinels attack the Nebuchadnezzar. Standing by Neo's body, Trinity confesses her love for him and reveals that the Oracle prophesied she would fall in love with the One. In the Matrix, Neo revives with the ability to perceive and manipulate its code. He effortlessly destroys Smith and escapes the Matrix just as the Nebuchadnezzar ' s electromagnetic pulse disables the Sentinels. Later, within the Matrix, Neo communicates with the system, vowing to show humanity a world of limitless possibilities, before flying away.

In 2067, life on Earth is collapsing. NASA scientists Amelia Brand, Romilly, and Doyle are set to embark on an intergalactic mission to find life on other planets, after earlier missions—called Lazarus —reported habitable environments in faraway systems, accessible by a wormhole near Saturn. Former NASA pilot Cooper is led by coincidence (he refuses to term it supernatural) to the secret NASA facility where Amelia's father and mission leader, Professor Brand, convinces him to join. Despite objections from his young daughter Murph, Cooper leaves to pilot the Endurance spacecraft. After a two-year voyage to Saturn, the spacecraft passes through the wormhole, emerging into a planetary system orbiting a supermassive black hole, Gargantua. Three planets, previously explored by Miller, Mann, and Edmunds, respectively, have shown signs of habitability. The first and closest, Miller's planet, turns out to be an ocean world with massive tsunamis. Doyle perishes on the planet, and Amelia and Cooper struggle to escape. They return to the Endurance after 23 Earth years have passed due to the extreme time dilation caused by the planet's proximity to Gargantua's gravity. Alone aboard the Endurance, Romilly significantly ages. Their full mission compromised, the team decides to investigate Mann's planet, at the expense of ever visiting Edmunds' planet. While there, a message is relayed from Earth that Professor Brand has passed away. On his deathbed, Professor Brand told Murph, herself a scientist now, that the Endurance mission was never meant to return (since humanity's Earth existence is doomed). Murph feels betrayed that Cooper left knowingly, though he was misled as well. Cooper resolves to return, but Mann tries to stop him. It emerges that Mann falsified data of his planet's habitability, in hopes of being rescued. While he escapes, Romilly is killed in the process. Mann dies in space, leaving Amelia and Cooper as the lone survivors. Aboard a damaged spacecraft with limited resources, Cooper proposes a gravitational slingshot around Gargantua to Edmunds' planet. This will save fuel but lose them time (50+ Earth years) due to time dilation. At the last moment, Cooper ejects from the Endurance, sacrificing himself so that Amelia can complete the mission. Cooper is sucked into the black hole, falling into an unusual tesseract, where time is a physical dimension. He sees himself decades ago inside Murph's bedroom and realises he can interact with objects there. Knowing Murph will return in her adult life, he encodes data about the black hole into the ticking of his old wristwatch (placed on Murph's bookshelf). After Professor Brand’s death, Murph visits her childhood bedroom, where she comes across Cooper's wristwatch. She deduces that the supernatural coincidence that led Cooper to NASA was Cooper himself (communicating from the future), and uses the wristwatch data to finish Professor Brand’s incomplete work. Cooper realizes that humans in the far distant future have built the wormhole and are arranging events, in a way analogous to how he is communicating with Murph, to create the sequence that will ultimately save mankind. Cooper is ejected from the tesseract and is picked up in the future (his present) by a spacecraft orbiting Saturn. On a space station with a recreated healthy Earth environment, he is reunited with Murph. It is she who directed humanity's exodus from a dying Earth. Murph, now older than Cooper, who has a calendar (if not physical) age of 124, is surrounded by her descendants and does not want Cooper to witness her death. She suggests he seek out Amelia on Edmunds' planet. As Cooper sets out again, Amelia is shown discovering Edmunds' destroyed ship, and kneeling before a grave she's constructed for him. With Edmunds presumably dead, robots build a colony on the planet's surface, and Amelia removes her helmet to breathe in the air from the planet's atmosphere.

Three years after the destruction of the Death Star, the Imperial fleet, led by Darth Vader, dispatches probe droids across the galaxy in search of the Rebel Alliance. One probe locates the Rebel base on the ice planet Hoth. A wampa captures Luke Skywalker before he can investigate the probe crash site, but he escapes by using the Force to retrieve his lightsaber and wound the beast. Before Luke succumbs to hypothermia, the Force spirit of his deceased mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, instructs him to go to the swamp planet Dagobah to train as a Jedi Knight under Jedi Master Yoda. Han Solo discovers Luke and insulates him against the weather inside a tauntaun carcass until they are rescued the next morning. Alerted to the Rebels' location, the Empire launches a large-scale attack using AT-AT walkers, forcing the Rebels to evacuate the base. Han, Princess Leia, C-3PO and Chewbacca escape aboard the Millennium Falcon, but the ship's hyperdrive malfunctions. They hide in an asteroid field, where Han and Leia grow closer amid the tension. Vader summons several bounty hunters, including Boba Fett, to find the Falcon. Evading the Imperial fleet, Han's group travels to the floating Cloud City on the gas planet Bespin, which is governed by his old friend Lando Calrissian. Fett tracks them there, and Vader forces Lando to surrender the group to the Empire, knowing Luke will come to their aid. Meanwhile, Luke travels with R2-D2 in his X-wing fighter to Dagobah, where he crash-lands. He meets Yoda, a diminutive creature who reluctantly accepts him as his Jedi apprentice after conferring with Obi-Wan's spirit. Yoda trains Luke to master the light side of the Force and resist negative emotions that will seduce him to the dark side, as they did Vader. Luke struggles to control his anger and impulsiveness and fails to comprehend the nature and power of the Force until he witnesses Yoda using it to levitate the X-wing from the swamp. Luke has a premonition of Han and Leia suffering, and, despite protestations from Obi-Wan and Yoda, he abandons his training to rescue them. Although Obi-Wan believes Luke is their only hope, Yoda asserts that "there is another." Leia confesses her love for Han before Vader freezes him in carbonite to test whether the process will safely imprison Luke. Han survives and is given to Fett, who intends to collect the bounty on Han from Jabba the Hutt. Lando frees Leia and Chewbacca, but they are too late to stop Fett's escape. The group fights its way back to the Falcon and flees the city. Luke arrives and engages Vader in a lightsaber duel over the city's central air shaft. Vader defeats Luke, severing his right hand and separating him from his lightsaber. He urges Luke to embrace the dark side and help him destroy his master, the Emperor, so they may rule the galaxy together. Luke refuses, citing Obi-Wan's claim that Vader killed his father, which prompts Vader to reveal that he is Luke's father. Distraught, Luke plunges down the air shaft and is ejected beneath the floating city, where he dangles from an antenna. He reaches out through the Force to Leia, and the Falcon returns to rescue him. They are pursued by TIE fighters and Vader's Star Destroyer, but manage to escape after R2-D2 repairs the Falcon ' s hyperdrive. After the group joins the Rebel fleet, Luke's missing hand is replaced by a robotic prosthesis. He, Leia, C-3PO, and R2-D2 observe as Lando and Chewbacca depart on the Falcon to find Han.

In 2029, Earth has been ravaged by the war between the malevolent artificial intelligence Skynet and the human resistance. Skynet sends the T-1000 —an advanced, shape-shifting prototype Terminator made of virtually indestructible liquid metal —back in time to kill resistance leader John Connor when he is a child. To protect John, the resistance sends back a reprogrammed T-800 Terminator, a less advanced metal endoskeleton covered in living tissue. In 1995 Los Angeles, John's mother Sarah is incarcerated in Pescadero State Hospital for her violent efforts to prevent " Judgment Day "—the prophesied events of August 29, 1997, when Skynet will gain sentience and, in response to its creators' attempts to deactivate it, incite a nuclear holocaust. John, living with foster parents, also considers Sarah delusional and resents her efforts to prepare him for his future role. The T-1000 locates John in a shopping mall, but the T-800 intervenes, coming to John's aid and enabling his escape. John calls to warn his foster parents, but the T-800 deduces that the T-1000 has already killed them. Realizing the T-800 is programmed to obey him, John forbids it to kill people and orders it to help him rescue Sarah from the T-1000. The T-800 and John intercept Sarah as she attempts to escape the hospital. Initially horrified that the T-800 resembles the Terminator sent to kill her in 1984, she joins them and escapes the pursuing T-1000. Sarah uses the T-800's knowledge of the future to learn that a revolutionary microprocessor, being developed by Cyberdyne engineer Miles Dyson, will be crucial to Skynet's creation. Over the course of their journey, Sarah sees the T-800 serving as a friend and father figure to John, who teaches it catchphrases and hand signs while encouraging it to become more human-like. Sarah plans to escape to Mexico with John, but a nightmare about Judgment Day prompts her to decide to kill Dyson. She attacks him in his home but cannot bring herself to go through with it and relents. John arrives and reconciles with Sarah while the T-800 explains to Dyson the future consequences of his work. Dyson reveals that his research has been reverse engineered from the CPU and severed arm of the 1984 Terminator. Believing that his work must be destroyed, Dyson helps Sarah, John, and the T-800 break into Cyberdyne, retrieve the CPU and the arm, and set explosives to destroy the lab. The police assault the building and fatally shoot Dyson, but he detonates the explosives as he dies. The T-1000 pursues the surviving trio, cornering them in a steel mill. Sarah and John split up to escape while the T-1000 mangles the T-800 and briefly deactivates it by destroying its power source. The T-1000 assumes Sarah's appearance and voice to lure out John, but Sarah intervenes and, along with the reactivated T-800, pushes it into a vat of molten steel, where it disintegrates. John also throws the 1984 Terminator's arm and CPU into the vat. The T-800 explains that it must also be destroyed to prevent it from serving as a foundation for Skynet. Despite John's tearful protests, the T-800 persuades him that its destruction is the only way to protect their future. Sarah, having come to respect the T-800, shakes its hand and lowers it into the vat. The T-800 gives John a thumbs-up as it is incinerated. As Sarah drives down a highway with John, she reflects on her renewed hope for an unknown future, musing that if the T-800 could learn the value of life, so can humanity.

In 1890s London, Robert Angier, Alfred Borden, and Angier's wife, Julia, work as magician's assistants under the mentorship of John Cutter. During a water tank trick, Julia drowns after Borden incorrectly ties her wrists. Angier blames Borden, and the two men become bitter rivals. Both men pursue separate careers in magic. Borden, a gifted inventor of illusions, marries a woman named Sarah, with whom he has a daughter named Jess, and hires an enigmatic assistant, Fallon. Angier, whose strength lies more in showmanship, continues working with Cutter and takes on a new assistant, Olivia. The feud escalates as Angier and Borden visit and sabotage each other's acts. Borden loses two fingers after being shot by Angier during a pistol trick, and Borden violently thwarts Angier's bird act in front of a live audience. Borden next debuts a spectacular illusion, The Transported Man, in which he appears to teleport from one side of the stage to the other almost instantly. Angier becomes obsessed with discovering the trick's secret and, with Cutter's help, roughly recreates the act using a lookalike named Root, a failed actor. Though Angier's version is successful, he resents remaining hidden beneath the stage while Root takes the applause. Desperate to outdo Borden, he sends Olivia to spy on him, but she falls in love with Borden and defects, and passes Borden's coded diary to Angier. Borden reveals to Angier that the key word, TESLA, supposedly decrypts the diary and reveals his method. Seeking answers, Angier travels to Colorado Springs to meet the inventor Nikola Tesla. Believing Tesla built a teleportation device for Borden, Angier commissions Tesla to make one. Tesla eventually delivers a working machine but warns that it will bring only misery. When used, the device creates a duplicate of its subject while leaving the original person intact. In London, Angier uses the machine in a new illusion, The Real Transported Man, which earns him acclaim. Sarah, suspicious of Borden's secrecy and affair with Olivia, hangs herself. Determined to uncover Angier's method, Borden sneaks backstage during a performance of The Real Transported Man and witnesses Angier fall into a water tank and drown. He attempts to open the tank and save Angier, but is arrested for Angier's murder, convicted, and sentenced to death. While awaiting execution, Borden is approached by a solicitor for a wealthy Lord Caldlow, who offers to care for Borden's daughter Jess in exchange for the secret behind the original Transported Man. When Caldlow visits the prison, Borden is horrified to discover that he is actually Angier. Borden passes this Angier a note revealing the secret, but Angier tears it up, leaving him to hang. Cutter helps dispose of Tesla's teleportation machine. A disguised visitor shoots Angier in the basement of his theater, revealing himself as Borden. The mortally wounded Angier learns the truth: "Borden" is in fact a pair of identical twins sharing one identity. One twin loved Sarah, the other Olivia; one lost two fingers, and the other amputated his same two fingers to match; one has survived, while the other was executed. Together they performed The Transported Man by switching places undetected, and whenever one twin was performing, the other hid using prosthetics and makeup under the identity "Fallon". Dying, Angier confesses that each time he used Tesla's machine, it created a clone, one of whom drowned beneath the stage each night, and that he is no longer sure of his own identity. The surviving Borden brother reclaims his daughter, as Cutter narrates that the final act of any magic trick—the "prestige"—is the return of what was thought lost. Angier's death knocks over a kerosene lamp that sends his theater up in flames, revealing rows of water tanks holding the corpses of his many duplicates.

In 1985, teenager Marty McFly lives in Hill Valley, California, with his depressed alcoholic mother, Lorraine; his older siblings, who are professional and social failures; and his meek father, George, who is bullied by his supervisor, Biff Tannen. After Marty's band fails a music audition, he confides in his girlfriend, Jennifer Parker, that he fears becoming like his parents despite his ambitions. That night, Marty meets his eccentric scientist friend, Emmett "Doc" Brown, in the Twin Pines mall parking lot. Doc unveils a time machine built from a modified DeLorean, powered by plutonium he swindled from Libyan terrorists. After Doc inputs a destination time of November 5, 1955 (the day he conceived his time travel invention), the terrorists arrive unexpectedly and gun him down. Marty flees in the DeLorean, inadvertently activating time travel when reaching 88 miles per hour (142 kilometers per hour). Arriving in 1955, Marty discovers he has no plutonium, so he cannot return to 1985. While exploring a burgeoning Hill Valley, Marty encounters his teenage father, discovering Biff was bullying George even then. George falls into the path of an oncoming car while spying on the teenage Lorraine changing clothes, and Marty is knocked unconscious while saving him. He wakes to find himself tended to by Lorraine, who becomes infatuated with him. Marty tracks down and convinces a younger Doc that he is from the future. Doc explains the only source available in 1955 capable of generating the 1.21 gigawatts of power required for time travel is a lightning bolt. Marty shows Doc a flyer from the future that documents an upcoming lightning strike at the town's courthouse. As Marty's siblings begin to fade from a photo he carries with him, Doc realizes Marty's actions are altering the future and jeopardizing his existence: Lorraine was supposed to tend to George instead of Marty after the car accident. Early attempts to get his parents acquainted fail, Marty gains the animosity of Biff, and Lorraine's infatuation with Marty deepens. Lorraine asks Marty to the school dance, and he plots to feign inappropriate advances on her, allowing George to intervene and rescue her, but the plan goes awry when Biff's gang locks Marty in the trunk of the performing band's car, while Biff forces himself onto Lorraine. George arrives expecting to find Marty but is assaulted by Biff. After Biff hurts Lorraine, an enraged George knocks him unconscious and escorts the grateful Lorraine to the dance. The band frees Marty from their car, but the lead guitarist injures his hand in the process, so Marty takes his place, performing while George and Lorraine share their first kiss. With his future no longer in jeopardy, Marty hurries to the courthouse to meet Doc. Doc discovers a letter from Marty warning him about his future and rips it up, worried about the consequences. To save Doc, Marty recalibrates the DeLorean to return ten minutes before he had left the future. The lightning strikes, sending Marty back to 1985, but the DeLorean breaks down, forcing Marty to run back to the mall. He arrives as Doc is being shot. While Marty grieves at his side, Doc sits up, revealing he had pieced Marty's note back together and is wearing a bulletproof vest. He takes Marty home and departs to 2015 in the DeLorean. Marty wakes the next morning, discovering his father is now a confident and successful science fiction author, his mother is fit and happy, his siblings are successful, and Biff is a servile valet in George's employ. As Marty reunites with Jennifer, Doc suddenly reappears in the DeLorean, insisting they return with him to the future to save their children from terrible fates.

The commercial space tug Nostromo is returning to Earth with a seven-member crew in "stasis": captain Dallas, executive officer Kane, warrant officer Ripley, navigator Lambert, science officer Ash, and engineers Parker and Brett, along with the ship's cat, Jones. The ship's computer, "Mother", detects a transmission from a nearby planet and wakes the crew. Following company policy to investigate transmissions indicating intelligent life, they leave their payload in orbit and land on the surface, but the ship is damaged. Dallas, Kane, and Lambert discover that the transmission comes from a derelict alien vessel. Inside is a giant, fossilized alien corpse with a hole in its torso. Meanwhile, Mother partially deciphers the transmission, which Ripley determines is a warning beacon and not an SOS as first thought. Kane enters a chamber containing hundreds of large eggs. When he touches one, an arthropod -like lifeform springs out, penetrates his helmet, and attaches to his face. Back at the Nostromo, Ripley refuses to allow them aboard, citing quarantine regulations, but Ash disobeys her. While the engineers work on ship repairs, Ash attempts to extricate the creature from Kane's face; he stops when he discovers that its highly corrosive acidic blood could harm Kane and damage the ship's hull. The creature eventually detaches itself and dies. After the crew returns to space, Kane awakens and seems well. During a final crew meal before returning to stasis, he suddenly chokes and convulses as a small alien creature bursts from his chest and escapes into the ship. After ejecting Kane's body into space, the crew uses tracking devices to try to locate and kill the creature. Encountering Jones, Brett follows him into a landing leg compartment, where the now fully-grown alien kills him. The crew determines that the alien is moving around the ship within the air ducts, and Dallas devises a plan to force the creature off the ship with an airlock. Dallas asks Mother about alternative methods of killing the alien and their chances of succeeding, but the computer ominously refuses to answer his questions. Dallas then enters the ducts with a flamethrower but is ambushed and killed by the alien. A hysterical Lambert believes that they will all die and suggests abandoning the Nostromo and leaving in the ship's escape shuttle. Ripley, now in command, rejects the plan because the shuttle can not support the remaining four crew members. Ripley decides they will try Dallas's plan again. She accesses Mother herself and discovers a secret company directive: Ash must return with the alien for study, regardless of risk to the crew. Ash attempts to kill her when confronted, and Parker attacks and incapacitates Ash, who is now revealed to be an android. Ash states that the alien can not be killed and expresses admiration for it. Parker incinerates Ash's remains. With no hope of defeating the alien, Ripley decides to initiate the Nostromo ' s self-destruct sequence and go ahead with Lambert's plan to abandon the ship. While they are gathering supplies, the alien kills both Parker and Lambert. Now alone, Ripley starts the self-destruct process, but the alien blocks her route to the escape shuttle. Ripley narrowly escapes and turns back to abort the sequence but fails to return before the override option expires. With only a few minutes left to evacuate, Ripley frantically returns to the shuttle and finds that the alien is gone. She takes Jones, boards the shuttle and launches it seconds before the Nostromo explodes. As Ripley prepares for stasis, she discovers that the alien has stowed itself in a narrow compartment aboard the shuttle. She dons a spacesuit and helmet, loads a grappling hook gun, and straps herself to a chair before she begins discharging gases to drive the alien from its hiding place. It tries to attack her, but she opens the shuttle door. The resulting depressurization blast leaves the alien clinging to the door frame. Ripley shoots it with the gun, knocking it out, but the door closes on the grapple line, leaving the alien tethered to the ship. As it swings behind an engine nacelle, Ripley fires the engines to sever the line and blast the alien into space. After recording her log entry, she places Jones and herself into stasis to start their return journey to Earth.

In a prehistoric veld, a tribe of hominins is driven away from a water hole by a rival tribe, and the next day finds an alien monolith. The tribe learns how to use the bones of dead animals as weapons and, after a successful first hunt, uses them to drive away the rival tribe. Millions of years later, Dr Heywood Floyd, Chairman of the United States National Council of Astronautics, travels to Clavius Base, an American lunar outpost. During a stopover at Space Station Five, he meets Russian scientists who are concerned that Clavius seems to be unresponsive. He refuses to discuss rumours of an epidemic at the base. At Clavius, Floyd addresses a meeting of personnel, stressing the need for secrecy regarding their newest discovery. His mission is to investigate a recently found artefact, a monolith buried four million years earlier near the lunar crater Tycho. As Floyd and others examine and photograph the object, it emits a high-powered radio signal. Eighteen months later, the American spacecraft Discovery One is bound for Jupiter, with mission pilots and scientists Dr Dave Bowman and Dr Frank Poole on board, along with three other scientists in suspended animation. Most of Discovery ' s operations are controlled by HAL, a HAL 9000 computer with a human-like personality. When HAL reports the imminent failure of an antenna control device, Bowman retrieves it in an extravehicular activity (EVA) pod, but finds nothing wrong. HAL suggests reinstalling the device and letting it fail so the problem can be verified. Mission Control advises the astronauts that results from their backup 9000 computer indicate that HAL has made an error, but HAL blames it on human error. Concerned about HAL's behaviour, Bowman and Poole enter an EVA pod so they can talk in private without HAL overhearing. They agree to disconnect HAL if he is proven wrong. HAL follows their conversation by lip reading. While Poole is floating away from his pod to replace the antenna unit, HAL takes control of the pod and attacks him, sending Poole tumbling away from the ship with a severed air line. Bowman takes another pod to rescue Poole. While he is outside, HAL turns off the life support functions of the crewmen in suspended animation, killing them. When Bowman returns to the ship with Poole's body, HAL refuses to let him back in, stating that their plan to deactivate him jeopardises the mission. Bowman releases Poole's body and opens the ship's emergency airlock with his remote manipulators. Lacking a helmet for his spacesuit, he positions his pod carefully so that when he jettisons the pod's door, he is propelled by the escaping air across the vacuum into Discovery ' s airlock. He enters HAL's processor core and begins disconnecting HAL's memory, ignoring HAL's pleas to stop. When he is finished, a prerecorded video by Heywood Floyd plays, revealing that the mission's actual objective is to investigate the radio signal sent from the monolith to Jupiter. At Jupiter, Bowman finds a third, much larger monolith orbiting the planet. He leaves Discovery in an EVA pod to investigate. He is pulled into a vortex of coloured light and observes bizarre astronomical phenomena and strange landscapes of unusual colours as he passes by. Finally, he finds himself in a large neoclassical bedroom where he sees, then becomes, older versions of himself: first standing in the bedroom, middle-aged and still in his spacesuit, then dressed in leisure attire and eating dinner, and finally as an old man lying in bed. A monolith appears at the foot of the bed, and as Bowman reaches for it, he is transformed into a foetus enclosed in a transparent orb of light, which afterwards floats in space above the Earth.

Joel Barish discovers that his estranged girlfriend, Clementine Kruczynski, has undergone a procedure to have her memories of him erased by the suburban Long Island firm Lacuna. Heartbroken, he decides to undergo the same procedure. In preparation, he records a tape recounting his memories of their volatile relationship. The Lacuna employees work on Joel's brain as he sleeps in his apartment so that he will wake up with no memory of the procedure. One employee, Patrick, leaves to see Clementine; since her procedure, he has been using Clementine's memories of Joel as a guide to seduce her. While the procedure runs on Joel's brain, the technician, Stan, and the secretary, Mary, take drugs, party, and have sex. Joel re-experiences his memories of Clementine in reverse chronological order as they are erased, starting with their last fight. As he reaches earlier, happier memories, he realizes that he does not want to forget her. His mental projection of Clementine suggests that he hides her in memories that do not involve her. This halts the procedure, but Stan calls his boss, Howard, who arrives and restarts it. Joel comes to his last remaining memory of Clementine: the day they first met, on a beach in Montauk. As the memory crumbles around them, Clementine tells Joel to meet her in Montauk. In Joel's apartment, Mary tries to impress Howard through their mutual interest in poetry by reciting a verse from Eloisa to Abelard. While Stan is outside, she tells Howard she is in love with him and they kiss. Howard's wife arrives and sees them through the window. Enraged, she tells Howard to tell Mary the truth: Mary and Howard had previously had an affair, and Mary had her memories of it erased. Disgusted, Mary steals the Lacuna records and mails them to the patients, including Joel and Clementine. Joel wakes up on Valentine's Day with his memories of Clementine erased. He impulsively takes the Long Island Rail Road to Montauk and calls in sick to work. He accidentally meets Clementine on the train ride home; they are drawn to one another, and go on a date to the frozen Charles River in Boston. Joel drives Clementine home and Patrick sees the two of them, realizing they have found each other again. Joel and Clementine receive their Lacuna records from Mary and listen to their tapes together. They are shocked by the bitter memories they had of each other and almost separate again, but agree to try again.

The story begins in 1973 Moscow, where engineer Aleksandr "Shurik" Timofeyev (Aleksandr Demyanenko) is working on a time machine in his apartment. By accident, he sends Ivan Vasilievich Bunsha (Yury Yakovlev), superintendent of his apartment building, and George Miloslavsky (Leonid Kuravlyov), a burglar, back into the 16th century — the time of tsar Ivan IV "The Terrible". The pair is forced to disguise themselves, with Bunsha dressing up as tsar Ivan IV and Miloslavsky as a knyaz (prince) of the same name. At the same time, the real Ivan IV (also played by Yury Yakovlev) is sent by the same machine into Shurik's apartment, and he has to deal with modern-day life while Shurik tries to fix the machine so that everyone can be brought back to their proper timelines. Superintendent Bunsha and Tsar Ivan IV are lookalikes but have completely different personalities, which results in the comedy of mistaken identity. As the Militsiya (police), tipped off by a neighbor who was burgled by Miloslavsky, close in on Shurik, who is frantically trying to repair the machine, the cover of Bunsha and Miloslavsky is blown and they have to fight off the Streltsy (tsar's guards), who have figured out that Bunsha is an impostor. The film ends with Bunsha, Miloslavsky, and Ivan IV all transported back to their proper timelines, although the entire episode is revealed to be a dream by Shurik... or was it?