Figée dans les glaces de l'Antarctique depuis la préhistoire, une mante religieuse géante est libérée à la suite de la brisure d'un iceberg. Le monstre attaque alors New York, puis Washington. L'armée va devoir stopper l'insecte.
During 1964, in the months following World War III, the conflict has devastated the northern hemisphere, polluting the atmosphere with nuclear fallout, killing all life there. Air currents are slowly carrying the fallout south; the only areas still habitable are in the far reaches of the southern hemisphere.
An international consortium of scientists, operating as Project Inner Space in Tanganyika, Africa, is trying to tap into the Earth's geothermal energy by drilling a very deep hole down to the Earth's core. The scientists are foiled by an extremely dense layer of material at the boundary between the two. To penetrate the barrier and reach the magma below, they intend to detonate an atomic device at the bottom of the hole.
Late one night, near Billings, Montana, a gas tanker is driving by when meteoroid suddenly hits in front of the truck. The driver attempts to swerve out of the way, but loses control and overturns and the tanker explodes, causing a massive fire.
The O'Leary family are travelling to Chicago to start a new life when Patrick O'Leary tries to race a steam train in his wagon. He is killed when his horses bolt. His wife Molly and their three boys are left to survive on their own. In town she agrees to prove her skills as a laundress when a woman's dress is accidentally spattered with mud. She quickly proves herself and builds up a laundry business in an area known as "the Patch". Her sons are educated. One, Jack, becomes a reforming lawyer, but another, Dion, is involved in gambling. While washing a sheet, Mrs O'Leary discovers a drawing, apparently created by Gil Warren, a devious local businessman. Her sons realise that it reveals that he has a plan to run a tramline along a street that he and his cronies intend to buy up cheaply.
During a tennis match in Paris between Ferdinand de Lesseps (Tyrone Power) and his friend Vicomte Rene de Latour (Joseph Schildkraut), the enthusiastic admiration of Countess Eugenie de Montijo (Loretta Young) for de Lesseps attracts the attention of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (Leon Ames). Bonaparte sees to it that both she and de Lesseps are invited to his reception. At the party, a fortuneteller predicts that Eugenie will have a troubled life, but also wear a crown, and that de Lesseps will dig a ditch. Entranced by Eugenie's beauty, Bonaparte arranges for his romantic rival to be assigned to a diplomatic post in Egypt, joining his father, Count Mathieu de Lesseps (Henry Stephenson), the Consul-General. De Lesseps impulsively asks Eugenie to marry him immediately, but she turns him down.
Yankee lawyer John Reynolds (Wayne) and Southern Belle Julie Mirbeau (Ona Munson) meet and fall in love on a riverboat going to New Orleans in the Gay Nineties. Upon arrival they are met by Julie's father (Henry Stephenson) who runs the popular Louisiana State Lottery Company and Reynold's Aunt Blanche (Helen Westley) who is a key figure in the anti-Lottery forces hoping Wayne as State's Attorney will end the Lottery.
The film begins in the Seattle, Washington area with increasingly severe earthquake activity. A quake of magnitude 7.9 is measured at the Earthquake centre, where Dr. Samantha Hill takes command, displacing Dr. Jordan Fisher. U.S. President Paul Hollister and FEMA Director Roy Nolan are informed about the situation.
Prof. Andrew Boran (Kirk Scott) is a research scientist who discovers strange radio signals in space that appear to originate from the Earth. The signals seem to predict natural disasters occurring around the globe.
A long-period comet's orbit is determined to be crossing directly in the path of Earth's orbit. All of the world's nuclear states fire their missiles at the comet, but pieces of the comet continues to strike the Earth, contaminating the groundwater and causing millions to become sick.
Set in the 1920s in Pago Pago, Eastern Samoa, Charlotte, an American painter, arrives from Boston on the island of Alaya to visit her father, U. S. Navy Captain Bruckner, whom she hasn't seen in quite some time. Bruckner is the U.S. Congress-sanctioned Governor of the island, and he rules it with a stern, patrician, and thoroughly patronizing attitude towards the natives. Charlotte is somewhat taken aback by her father's rigid adherence to the law, particularly when she tries to intervene on behalf of Bruckner's charge/houseboy Matangi, who has involved Charlotte in a scheme to get Bruckner to toss out a harsh penalty issued to a native man who stole a boat "for love." Bruckner refuses, pish-poshing all this talk of love over the law, and severely reprimands Matangi, much to Charlotte's dismay.
Terry O'Neil (Charles Ray) is the youngest of a group of Irish-American firefighting brothers. He courts Helen Corwin (May McAvoy), the daughter of a politician whose crooked building contracts resulted in devastating blazes.
During the closing days of the Second World War, six members of his Royal Canadian Air Force fighter squadron are killed due to a command decision made by pilot Ted Stryker (Dana Andrews). Years later, in civilian life in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, a guilt-stricken Stryker goes through many jobs, and his marriage is in trouble.
Passengers on a plane headed from the Midwest to the West Coast (Winnipeg to Vancouver in the book; Minneapolis to Seattle in the film) get quite ill after eating the chicken pot pie entree. Both pilots also ate the chicken. A man who has not flown since the Vietnam War (single-engine planes in the book, helicopter/war choppers in the film) is reluctantly pressed into flying the plane, where he makes a very neurotic, but survivable landing.