Hilary Swank

In the near future, an extinction level event rocks planet Earth, and an underground bunker is activated. Its program is designed to repopulate the Earth. A robot, called Mother (voiced by Rose Byrne), initiates her program and grows a human embryo into a baby, which it then raises into childhood. The young girl asks Mother why she's the only child, and Mother tells her she needs some time to learn about raising children. Many years later, a teenage Daughter (Clara Rugaard) lives with Mother in the bunker. Mother gives Daughter lessons on ethics and morals in preparation for a looming exam. Later, the power goes out in the facility, taking mother out with it. Daughter goes to find the source of the trouble and captures a mouse that led to an electrical malfunction. Daughter thinks the mouse means there is life outside the bunker, but Mother believes the mouse could be a carrier for disease and incinerates it. Still curious, Daughter begins investigating, dons a hazmat suit, and starts poking around the facility's airlock. Once there, she hears a Woman (Hilary Swank) wounded badly from a gunshot and crying out for help from outside. Daughter opens the lock, gets the Woman to put on a hazmat suit, and leaves her hidden in the airlock as Mother quickly arrives. Mother insists that contagion outside the bunker would kill her, and then tells her that she take her exam immediately. Daughter heads back to the airlock to find the Woman asleep. She finds a gun in her bag and takes it, then gives her water - when the Woman takes her mask off to drink it, Daughter realizes there must not be contamination outside the bunker. While Daughter goes to get medical supplies, Woman sees Mother and reaches for her gun but finds it missing. When Daughter returns, Woman demands the gun saying that Mother is just like "her friends outside". Woman shoots at Mother but is quickly overpowered and taken to the infirmary, where the Woman refuses Mother's medical aid. Daughter confronts Mother about the supposed toxicity levels outside, and Mother admits that she lied to keep her safe and is not like the robots who attacked the Woman. Mother tells Daughter they can help any other survivors but they need the Woman to cooperate. Daughter tries to convince Woman that Mother isn't bad, but the Woman tells her she's seen the horrors the robots have inflicted. Daughter asks Mother if she knows other robots, but Mother says she doesn't remember ever not being in the bunker. Woman's conditions worsens, and Mother says she'll need surgery. Woman refuses to let Mother operate, so Daughter volunteers. Mother guides her through the surgery, which is tough but successful. After the surgery, Woman is kinder to Daughter. Woman confesses she was on a food run with her brother when the robots attacked. Her brother distracted them and she got away, never making it back to the mines where her people live. Woman tells Daughter she should go with her, but Mother interrupts and tells Daughter to take her exam. Mother confiscates Woman's bag, and when Daughter asks why, Mother says that the bullet they pulled from Woman matches the one she fired at Mother with gun she brought in - not a gun robots use. She was shot by another human. Mother thinks she's dangerous. Daughter completes the exam. When she passes, Mother allows Daughter to select a new embryo to add to their family. Daughter confronts Woman about lying, but Woman asks her if she saw the bullets with her own eyes. She breaches security and checks the bullets herself, and finds they don't match. She goes through more records and learns that Mother had raised several other children before her, and finds human remains in the incinerator. Daughter returns to Woman and tells her she believes her. Woman insists they go back to the mine, but Daughter wants to wait for her currently gestating new brother and says they just need to stay one more night. Before she can, Mother, who was eavesdropping on the escape plan, locks her in a room and goes Woman, demanding the location of the mines. Daughter breaks out, setting off alarms, and in the melee Woman is also able to escape. In order to escape, Woman holds a knife to Daughter's throat which forces Mother to open the airlock, and they escape. Daughter is angry, but goes along with Woman. Outside, they narrowly avoid some other robots, which appear to be planting crops and purifying the air. Mother says that before the robots the Earth was virtually uninhabitable. When they reach Woman's home, Daughter learns that Woman actually fled the tunnels years before and has been living alone for a long time. Daughter wants to find them, but Woman says they had devolved into madness. Daughter is horrified she left her brother and flees to go back to the compound - Woman refuses, too scared. She encounters a fleet of robots who let her pass. She enters the compound, taking an axe for protection, and finds Mother and her brother. Mother explains that she was created to protect humanity, and when she saw the human race destroying themselves, she took action to create a new world that humans would flourish in, and raising humans who are ethical. Mother lets Daughter hold her brother, and when Daughter attempts to flee, Mother chases her. Daughter aims a gun at her but Mother reveals that she is every robot on Earth - all one consciousness. Daughter pleads with Mother to let her raise the brother on her own, and Mother acquiesces, letting Daughter shoot her, destroying that body. The Woman is alone when Mother comes to her and implies that she was only alive and free to serve her plans, and kills her. At the compound, the Daughter sings a lullaby to her brother, then walks into the embryo room - now the mother to them all.

Erin Gruwell, a young teacher in a racially divided Los Angeles school, inspires her class of at-risk students, deemed incapable of learning, to learn tolerance, apply themselves, and pursue education beyond high school. It's 1994 in Long Beach, California. Idealistic Erin Gruwell is just starting her first teaching job, that as freshman and sophomore English teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School, which, two years earlier, implemented a voluntary integration program. For many of the existing teachers, the integration has ruined the school, whose previously stellar academic standing has been replaced with many students who will be lucky to graduate or even be literate. Despite choosing the school on purpose because of its integration program, Erin is unprepared for the nature of her classroom, whose students live by generations of strict moral codes of protecting their own at all cost. Many are in gangs and almost all know somebody that has been killed by gang violence. The Latinos hate the Cambodians who hate the blacks and so on. The only person the students hate more is Ms. Gruwell. It isn't until Erin holds an unsanctioned discussion about a recent drive-by shooting death that she fully begins to understand what she's up against. And it isn't until she provides an assignment of writing a daily journal - which will be not graded, and will remain unread by her unless they so choose - that the students begin to open up to her. As Erin tries harder and harder to have resources provided to teach properly (which often results in her needing to pay for them herself through working second and third jobs), she seems to face greater resistance, especially from her colleagues, such as Margaret Campbell, her section head, who lives by regulations and sees such resources as a waste, and Brian Gelford, who will protect his "priviledged" position of teaching the senior honors classes at all cost. Erin also finds that her teaching job is placing a strain on her marriage to Scott Casey, a man who seems to have lost his own idealistic way in life. —Huggo A young teacher inspires her class of at-risk students to learn tolerance, apply themselves and pursue education beyond high school. Woodrow Wilson High School is located in Long Beach, California. The school is voluntarily integrated, and it isn't working. The Asians, the blacks, the Latinos, and a very few whites not only don't get along but also stay within their cultural cliques and are part of protective and violent gangs. There isn't much teaching or learning going on at the school. It is a warehouse for young teenagers until they can drop out or are kicked out. —yusufpiskin

A small group of people at a business meeting. One of the group, a younger man, suddenly passes out on the board room table. Outside the building, flocks of birds begin to crash into nearby buildings and other stationary objects. At University of Chicago Dr Keyes is approached by two government officials and asked to leave with them, no questions asked. He's taken to a government facility where he meets a friend, Dr. Serge Leveque (Tchéky Karyo), a nuclear weapons expert. The two are shown into a large hangar where they're astonished to see the room is full of bodies draped in white sheets. An Army general, Purcell (Richard Jenkins) tells them that everyone in the room suddenly died at the exact same moment. After a few seconds of speculation, Keyes and Leveque conclude that all the victims had pacemakers. Purcell is impressed, telling them they figured out the mystery faster than anyone else he'd spoken to. While in it's re-entry procedure, the crew of the space shuttle Endeavor find themselves several miles off course. Instead of being aligned with Edwards Air Force Base, they are heading directly for downtown Los Angeles. The shuttle makes an emergency landing in the L.A. River, avoiding a catastrophic accident. Major Rebecca "Beck" Childs (Hilary Swank) was the navigator for the mission and is nearly court-martialed before it's determined that she performed her duties perfectly and that the strange magnetic anomalies around the world were responsible A series of disturbances caused by instability in the Earth's magnetic field lead geologist Dr. Josh Keyes (Aaron Eckhart) and scientists Serge Leveque (Tchéky Karyo) and Conrad Zimsky (Stanley Tucci) to learn that the Earth's molten core has stopped rotating. Within a year, the Earth's magnetic field will collapse, irradiating the planet. The three develop a plan with the United States government to bore into the Earth's core and plant a series of nuclear charges at precise points to restart the core's motion and restore the field. A former colleague-turned-adversary of Professor Zimsky, the rogue scientist Ed "Braz" Brazzelton (Delroy Lindo), has developed plans for a nuclear-powered vessel that could quickly drill through to the core aided by a high frequency pulse laser, with a hull made of "Unobtainium", an indestructible metal that can withstand the heat and pressure of the core. Braz also reveals that he and Zimsky have a checkered past: Zimsky stole a few research ideas from Braz and it led to a falling out between the two. Braz is willing to work with Zimsky again if it means saving the Earth. Though funding for his research has been hard to find, Purcell tells him he'll give him all the money he needs to complete work on a ship made of his compound in a few short months. The government funds the construction of the ship, which Brazzelton names Virgil, while Keyes enlists the help of computer hacker Theodore Donald "Rat" Finch (DJ Qualls) to keep news of the potential global disaster off the Internet and stem a worldwide panic. However, there is a hint that the Army is hiding the real reason of the impending catastrophe. Virgil is made up of several compartments and if any compartment of the ship is damaged, the operating system will eject that compartment to avoid risk to the rest of the ship. Keyes, Zimsky, Levequeand part of the crew. Virgil is piloted by Space Shuttle pilots Commander Robert Iverson (Bruce Greenwood) and Major Rebecca "Beck" Childs (Hilary Swank). The Virgil is launched through the Marianas Trench from an offshore platform. The team accidentally drills through a gigantic empty geode structure, damaging the lasers when it lands at its base and cracking the geode's structure and causing magma to flow in. Keyes and Zimsky find out that they are in fact inside a cobalt cocoon full of Amethyst. The crew repair and restart the laser array in time, but Iverson is killed by a falling crystal shard while returning to the ship. As Virgil continues, it clips a huge diamond that breaches the hull of the last compartment. Leveque sacrifices himself to save the nuclear launch codes before the compartment is crushed by extreme pressure. Virgil eventually reaches the molten core. The new data they gather there reveals a flaw in the plan. The outer layer of the Earth's Core is less dense than anticipated, and the explosions cannot generate the needed power. After some calculations, they decide that by splitting their nuclear weapons into the remaining compartments and jettisoning each at specific distances, they can create a "ripple effect", where the power of each bomb will push against the blast of the next, generating the needed energy wave. However, because Virgil was not designed to jettison undamaged compartments, the plan requires someone to deactivate a safety switch that is in an area exposed to the extreme temperatures. Brazzelton volunteers and deactivates the switch, dying shortly afterwards. Meanwhile on the surface, the public becomes aware of problems after super storms start to cover the world. Finch is unable to stop worldwide panic but instead learns of the top-secret project "DESTINI" (Deep Earth Seismic Trigger INItiative), which is to be deployed if the Virgil mission fails. Finch relays his information to Keyes, who discovers that Zimsky was one of DESTINI's lead scientists. DESTINI, according to Zimsky, was designed as a weapon to propagate earthquakes through the Earth's core, but its first activation has unintentionally stopped its rotation instead. Zimsky reveals the government will use it again to attempt a restart of the core. Keyes is convinced it will have disastrous results, so he has Finch hack into DESTINI's system and cut its power supply to buy the Virgil more time. Keyes and Zimsky realize they have miscalculated the necessary yield, but Zimsky gets trapped in a detaching compartment. Zimsky suggests they use the ship's nuclear fuel to achieve the sufficient yield, which will save the planet but leave Keyes and Childs without power. As the triggered explosions go off, successfully restarting the core's rotation, Keyes and Childs realize they can use the Unobtainium shell to convert the heat and pressure from the wave-front to power the Virgil, and they are able to escape the core. They break through the crust underwater, leaving them on the ocean floor without power and communications. They believe themselves lost but use the remaining power to activate a weak sonar beacon. The beacon attracts a nearby whale pod, and Finch is able to trace their whale songs to locate the Virgil. A week after the mission, Finch logs onto a computer at an internet cafe and releases the information about Project DESTINI, the Crew of Virgil and their mission onto the Internet.