A Glean movie guide
Mind-Bending Sci-Fi Thrillers
Rewind the future.
High-concept temporal action and gritty futures in the spirit of Looper.
Handpicked for this guide
The movie list
- 01
Edge of Tomorrow
A thrilling sci-fi loop where every death resets the clock on a high-stakes alien war.
Major Bill Cage is an officer who has never seen a day of combat when he is unceremoniously demoted and dropped into combat. Cage is killed within minutes, managing to take an alpha alien down with him. He awakens back at the beginning of the same day and is forced to fight and die again... and again - as physical contact with the alien has thrown him into a time loop.
- 02
Source Code
A tense race against time as a soldier repeatedly relives the final moments of a train bombing.
When decorated soldier Captain Colter Stevens wakes up in the body of an unknown man, he discovers he's part of a mission to find the bomber of a Chicago commuter train.
- 03
The Adam Project
A time-traveling pilot teams up with his younger self for a high-concept action adventure.
After accidentally crash-landing in 2022, time-traveling fighter pilot Adam Reed teams up with his 12-year-old self on a mission to save the future.
- 04
ARQ
An engineer protects a revolutionary energy source inside a tense, repeating dystopian time loop.
Two old friends living in a dystopic future become trapped in a mysterious time loop — one that may have something to do with an ongoing battle between an omnipotent corporation and a ragtag band of rebels.
- 05
Predestination
A dark temporal thriller built around complex time travel rules and identity paradoxes.
Predestination chronicles the life of a Temporal Agent sent on an intricate series of time-travel journeys designed to prevent future killers from committing their crimes. Now, on his final assignment, the Agent must stop the one criminal that has eluded him throughout time and prevent a devastating attack in which thousands of lives will be lost.
- 06
Upgrade
A gritty near-future action thriller where an AI implant grants a man brutal vengeance.
A brutal mugging leaves Grey Trace paralyzed in the hospital and his beloved wife dead. A billionaire inventor soon offers Trace a cure — an artificial intelligence implant called STEM that will enhance his body. Now able to walk, Grey finds that he also has superhuman strength and agility — skills he uses to seek revenge against the thugs who destroyed his life.
- 07
Tenet
A sleek, mind-bending espionage thriller driven by the high-concept manipulation of inverted entropy.
Armed with only one word - Tenet - and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.
- 08
Inception
A brilliant heist thriller that bends reality and logic through advanced dream-sharing technology.
Cobb, a skilled thief who commits corporate espionage by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets is offered a chance to regain his old life as payment for a task considered to be impossible: "inception", the implantation of another person's idea into a target's subconscious.
- 09
The Tomorrow War
Future soldiers recruit present-day fighters in a massive sci-fi battle to save humanity.
The world is stunned when a group of time travelers arrive from the year 2051 to deliver an urgent message: Thirty years in the future, mankind is losing a global war against a deadly alien species. The only hope for survival is for soldiers and civilians from the present to be transported to the future and join the fight. Among those recruited is high school teacher and family man Dan Forester. Determined to save the world for his young daughter, Dan teams up with a brilliant scientist and his estranged father in a desperate quest to rewrite the fate of the planet.
- 10
Dredd
A hard-boiled dystopian action film following a lawman cleaning up a violent futuristic tower.
In the future, America is a dystopian wasteland. The latest scourge is Ma-Ma, a prostitute-turned-drug pusher with a dangerous new drug and aims to take over the city. The only possibility of stopping her is an elite group of urban police called Judges, who combine the duties of judge, jury and executioner to deliver a brutal brand of swift justice. But even the top-ranking Judge, Dredd, discovers that taking down Ma-Ma isn’t as easy as it seems in this explosive adaptation of the hugely popular comic series.