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Elizabeth Lipp (Melina Mercouri) visits Istanbul, where she sees a traveling fair featuring replicas of treasures from the Topkapı Palace. Next she cases the Topkapı, fascinated by the emerald- encrusted dagger of Sultan Mahmud I. Leaving Turkey, she recruits her ex- lover, Swiss master-criminal Walter Harper (Maximilian Schell), to plan a theft of the dagger. They engage Cedric Page (Robert Morley), master of all things mechanical; Giulio, "The Human Fly" (Gilles Ségal), a mute acrobat; and the burly Hans (Jess Hahn), who will provide the muscle needed for the job. Harper and Lipp then hire small-time hustler Arthur Simon Simpson (Peter Ustinov) to drive a car into Turkey to transport hidden explosives and firearms for use in the burglary. Simpson, knowing nothing of Harper's and Lipp's plans, is arrested at the border when Turkish Customs find the firearms. Because Simpson has no information for Turkish police, they conclude that the weapons are to be used in an assassination. Turkish Major Tufan decides to use Simpson to spy on Harper and Lipp for the police. Page, picking up the car in Istanbul, is told by a police ruse that only the "importer" Simpson is permitted to drive it in Turkey. While traveling with the gang, Simpson leaves cryptic notes for his police handlers, but most of his intelligence is worthless since Simpson is still ignorant of the plan. Hans' hands are injured in a scuffle with the drunken cook, Gerven (Akim Tamiroff), and Simpson is engaged as a substitute, prompting him to confess that the police are watching them. Knowing they face arrest if they try to escape Turkey, or use their equipment, Harper improvises a new plan in which they will give the still-oblivious police the slip, and steal the dagger without using their weapons. Then they'll "surrender" to the police, and claim to have found explosives in their car. Just before they leave, Simpson discards his last note, then leaves with the others. Harper arranges to give the police the slip. That evening, Harper, Simpson, and Giulio steal the dagger and leave a replica in its place. Unnoticed by the thieves, during the robbery a bird flies through the window they entered by and is trapped inside the room when the window is closed. The gang deliver the dagger to Joseph (Joe Dassin), proprietor of the traveling fair display, who will smuggle it out of the country. The gang members then go to police headquarters to "reveal" their discovery of weapons in the car. The inspector asks Simpson to vouch for Harper and Lipp's whereabouts that day. Simpson, seeming to waver, throws in his lot with the others, and backs up their alibi. Before the police release Simpson and the others, the trapped bird in the Topkapı triggers the alarm, alerting police officers across Istanbul. When word of the Topkapı alarm reaches the police, Major Tufan confronts the thieves, displaying Simpson's last note, which has just enough information to link all of them to the theft. Tufan tells them all that he now knows why they were in Turkey. "A little bird told me," he says. Ultimately, the gang is seen in a Turkish prison, where Lipp begins to tell them of her fascination with the Russian Imperial Crown Jewels in the Kremlin. The end title sequence shows them apparently escaped from jail some time later and walking in snow by a Russian city. 

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Six months after the events of The Matrix, Neo and Trinity are now romantically involved. Morpheus receives a message from Captain Niobe of the Logos calling an emergency meeting of all ships of Zion. Zion has confirmed the last transmission of the Osiris: an army of Sentinels is tunneling towards Zion and will reach it within 72 hours. Commander Lock orders all ships to return to Zion to prepare for the onslaught, but Morpheus asks one ship to remain to contact the Oracle. As the Caduceus receives a message from the Oracle, one of the Caduceus crew, Bane, encounters Smith, who reveals that his previous encounter with Neo severed his connection with the Matrix and has made him a rogue program, then absorbs his avatar. Smith then uses the phone line to leave the Matrix and gain control of Bane's real body. In Zion, Morpheus announces the news of the advancing machines to the people. In the Matrix, Neo meets the Oracle's bodyguard Seraph, who leads him to her. After realizing that the Oracle is part of the Matrix, Neo asks how he can trust her; she replies that this is his decision. The Oracle instructs Neo to reach the Source of the Matrix with the help of the Keymaker. As the Oracle departs, Smith appears, telling Neo that after being defeated, he refused to be deleted and is now a rogue program. He demonstrates his ability to clone himself using other inhabitants of the Matrix, including other Agents, as hosts. He then tries to absorb Neo but fails, prompting a battle between Smith's clones and Neo. Neo manages to defend himself, but is forced to retreat from the increasingly overwhelming numbers. Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity visit the Merovingian, who is imprisoning the Keymaker. The Merovingian, a rogue Matrix program with his own agenda, refuses to let him go. His wife Persephone, seeking revenge on her husband for his infidelity, leads the trio to the Keymaker. Morpheus, Trinity, and the Keymaker flee while Neo holds off the Merovingian's henchmen. Morpheus and Trinity try to escape with the Keymaker, pursued by several Agents and the Merovingian's chief henchmen, the Twins. After a long chase, Trinity escapes, Morpheus defeats the Twins, and Neo saves Morpheus and the Keymaker from Agent Johnson. The crews of the Nebuchadnezzar, Vigilant, and Logos help the Keymaker and Neo reach the Source. The Logos crew must destroy a power plant and the Vigilant crew must disable a back-up power station, to prevent a security system from being triggered, allowing Neo to open the door to the Source. Haunted by a vision of Trinity's death, Neo asks her to remain on the Nebuchadnezzar. The Logos succeeds, while the Vigilant is destroyed by a Sentinel, killing everyone on board. Trinity replaces the Vigilant crew and completes their mission. However, Agent Thompson corners her and they fight. As Neo, Morpheus, and the Keymaker try to reach the Source, the Smiths ambush them. The Keymaker unlocks the door to the Source, but the Smiths shoot him dead as he closes the door. Neo meets a program called the Architect, the creator of the Matrix. The Architect explains that Neo is himself a program and an intentional part of the Matrix, which is now in its sixth iteration. Neo is meant to stop the Matrix's fatal system crash that naturally recurs due to the concept of human choice within it. As with the five previous Ones, Neo has a choice: either return to the Source to reboot the Matrix and pick survivors to repopulate the soon-to-be-destroyed Zion, as his predecessors all did, or cause the Matrix to crash and kill everyone connected to it, which would mean humanity's extinction when Zion is destroyed. Neo learns of Trinity's situation and chooses to save her instead of returning to the Source, to which the Architect responds dismissively. Trinity is shot as she and Agent Thompson fall off a building. Before she hits the ground, Neo catches her. He then removes the bullet from her heart and revives her. They return to the real world, where Sentinels attack them. The Nebuchadnezzar is destroyed, but the crew escape. Neo displays a new ability to disable the machines with his thoughts, but falls into a coma from the effort. The crew are picked up by another ship, the Hammer. Its captain, Roland, reveals the other ships were wiped out by the machines after someone activated an EMP too early, and that they found only one survivor: the Smith- possessed Bane. 

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The story is set in a fictional 1959, following two years of escalating tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union for dominance in the Middle East and in the Mediterranean Sea. The Soviets are menacing Turkey from three sides through their proxies in Egypt, Syria and Iraq in order to gain control of the Bosporus and give free passage to their large Mediterranean fleet. To counteract the Soviet menace the United States established a military presence in Lebanon and are providing aid to their Turkish and Israeli allies. As detailed in the book, the Soviets gained a temporary space supremacy through the launch of a massive fleet of militarized Sputniks; moreover, they are aware that, within three or four years, the United States will cover the gap. Intelligence from a Soviet officer who defected in Berlin provided information about a Soviet war plan involving a sudden, overwhelming nuclear first strike on U.S. and NATO military and civilian targets, in order to minimize retaliation and become the leading world power. According to the leaked war plan the Soviet leadership considers acceptable the loss of 20 to 30 million of their own civilian population due to the retaliatory strike by NATO. Narration follows the point of view of Randy Bragg, who lives an aimless life in the small Central Florida town of Fort Repose. His older brother, Colonel Mark Bragg, an Air Force Intelligence officer, sends a telegram ending in the words, "Alas, Babylon", a pre- established code between the brothers to warn of imminent disaster. Mark flies his family down to Fort Repose for their protection while he stays at Strategic Air Command headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska. Soon afterward, a U.S. fighter pilot, attempting to intercept an enemy plane over the Mediterranean, inadvertently destroys an ammunition depot in a large Soviet submarine base in Latakia, Syria. The explosion is mistaken for a large-scale U.S. air assault on the military facility and, by the following day, Soviet Union retaliates with its planned full-scale nuclear strike against the United States and its allies. U.S. missiles, with Mark as a witness, are sent in retaliation. Randy and his guests awake to the shaking from the bombing of nearby military bases; one explosion temporarily blinds Peyton, Randy's niece. Fort Repose descends into chaos: tourists are trapped in their hotels, communication lines fail, the CONELRAD radio system barely operates, convicts escape from prisons and a run on the banks causes currency to become worthless. In the weeks and months after the attack sporadic news gathered through an old but still-functioning vacuum tube radio receiver show that many major cities of the U.S. are in ruins and vast regions of the Continental United States are labeled by the government as off-limits, "contaminated zones". The whole of Florida is among the contaminated areas, leaving the stranded survivors of Fort Repose without hope of immediate assistance. Most of the government has been eliminated, with the U.S. presidency defaulting to Josephine Vanbruuker-Brown, the former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Other international broadcasts reveal that Western Europe was badly hit by Soviet missiles as well (a dire situation in southern France is mentioned). Soviet leadership was eliminated by U.S. retaliation and the capital of the Soviet Union was moved to Central Asia, but war still rages for months after the attack, although it is fought mostly between the remnants of U.S. Air Force and scattered Soviet Navy nuclear submarines. Since Randy was an Army Reserve officer before the Soviet attack, a radio dispatch by President Vanbruuker-Brown formally empowers him as the local authority under the current emergency situation. Randy then organizes a community self-defence team against bandits and tries to rid the community of radioactive jewellery taken into Fort Repose from the radioactive ruins of Miami. The search for alternative food sources is also prominent in the months following the attack, leading to the launch of a rag-tag fleet of fishing boats to sift the surrounding swamps for fish and to a desperate search for the much-needed salt. The following year, an Air Force helicopter arrives at Fort Repose. The crew assess the status of the residents and the local environment, explaining that the area around Fort Repose is perhaps the largest patch of non-contaminated soil in the whole State of Florida and that, after all, the survivors of Fort Repose managed to fare better than many other places in the U.S. Randy also learns that his brother Mark has most likely died when Omaha and Offutt Base were destroyed by multiple hits. When the crew of the helicopter offer to evacuate the residents out of Florida, the residents choose to stay. It is finally revealed that the United States won the war, but at a tremendous cost: it lost most of its population (45 million survivors are estimated overall), its military, its infrastructure and most of its natural resources (ironically, the government is planning to use the large stockpiles of military-grade uranium and plutonium left from the war to power the surviving towns and cities). The U.S. is now receiving food, fuel and medicine aid from third-world countries such as Thailand, Indonesia and Venezuela. Apparently, the "Three Greats" (deliberately left unclear but likely India, China and Japan) have taken the role of world leading powers in place of U.S. and Soviet Union. 

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Each of the three acts of Noises Off contains a performance of the first act of a play within a play, a sex farce called Nothing On. The three acts of Noises Off are each named "Act One" on the contents page of the script, though they are labelled normally in the body of the script; and the programme for Noises Off will include, provided by the author, a comprehensive programme for the Weston-super-Mare run of Nothing On, including spoof advertisements (for sardines) and acknowledgments to the providers of mysterious props that do not actually appear (e.g. stethoscope, hospital trolley, and straitjacket). Nothing is seen of the rest of Nothing On. Nothing On is the type of play in which young girls run about in their underwear, old men drop their trousers, and many doors continually bang open and shut. It is set in "a delightful 16th-century posset mill",This is of course a joke by Frayn, which has caught out earlier Wiki-editors who have solemnly commented "it is uncertain what a posset mill might be. This may be a play on the phrase to mill a posset, attested in the Oxford English Dictionary as meaning to stir ingredients to make a posset." However, that comment would be typical of Frayn himself, and it is not impossible that he was the editor in question: the fake programme for Nothing On provided by the script includes its own explanation, as follows: "In a posset-mill production was maintained throughout the year by allowing the milk to run into a heated curdling chamber where the flow of incoming ale or vinegar was ingeniously harnessed to operate a simple kind of theatrical thundersheet. The product was then packed in small 'yoggy pots' made from the scrota of wild yogs".A posset was a medieval beverage made of curdled milk. See article on Round the Horne, a 1960s radio show which made posset a humorous word in English comedy. modernised by the current owners and available to let while they are abroad; the fictional playwright is appropriately named Robin Housemonger. Act One is set at the technical rehearsal at the (fictional) Grand Theatre in Weston-super-Mare; It is midnight, the night before the first performance and the cast are hopelessly unready. Baffled by entrances and exits, missed cues, missed lines, and bothersome props, including several plates of sardines, they drive Lloyd, their director, into a seething rage and back several times during the run. Act Two shows a Wednesday matinée performance one month later,Multiple sources report that Act Two is set on opening night. The plot synopsis here describes the script published in 2000, in which Michael Frayn notes that the play has been rewritten at least seven times. at the (fictional) Theatre Royal in Ashton-under-Lyne. In this act, the play is seen from backstage, providing a view that emphasises the deteriorating relationships between the cast. Romantic rivalries, lovers' tiffs and personal quarrels lead to offstage shenanigans, onstage bedlam and the occasional attack with a fire axe. In Act Three, we see a performance near the end of the ten-week run, at the (fictional) Municipal Theatre in Stockton-on-Tees. Relationships between the cast have soured considerably, the set is breaking down and props are winding up in the wrong hands, on the floor, and in the way. The actors remain determined at all costs to cover up the mounting chaos, but it is not long before the plot has to be abandoned entirely and the more coherent characters are obliged to take a lead in ad-libbing somehow towards some sort of end. Much of the comedy emerges from the subtle variations in each version as character flaws play off each other off-stage to undermine on-stage performance, with a great deal of slapstick. The contrast between players' on- stage and off-stage personalities is also a source of comic dissonance. 

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During a VIP visit to the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, the Air Force's early warning radar indicates that an unidentified aircraft has intruded into American airspace. Shortly after, the "intruder" is identified as an off-course civilian airliner and the alert is cancelled, but a computer error causes one American bomber group to receive apparently valid orders for a nuclear attack on Moscow. Attempts to rescind this order fail because a new Soviet countermeasure jams American radio communications. Unable to obtain confirmation or denial of the order, Colonel Jack Grady (Edward Binns), the US bomber group's commander, follows the order and commands his group to continue to their target. The president of the United States (Henry Fonda) and his advisers attempt to recall the bombers or shoot them down. Communications are opened with the Soviet chairman in which mistakes on both sides (the orders to the American bombers and the Soviet jamming) are acknowledged. The jamming ceases, but the crew follows their training, dismissing the subsequent counter-orders they receive as a Soviet ruse. The President struggles to find a solution that will stop the Soviet Union from counter-attacking; if he fails, a nuclear holocaust will be unavoidable. He offers to sacrifice an American target to appease the skeptical Soviets and prove that the attack was indeed an error, and he orders an American bomber towards New York City. The President's advisers in the Pentagon discover that in doing so, the President is sacrificing the First Lady, who is visiting New York City. A single American bomber reaches Moscow and destroys it. The President then orders General Black (Dan O'Herlihy), whose wife and children live in New York, to carry out a corresponding nuclear attack on that city, using the Empire State Building as ground zero. After releasing the bombs, Black kills himself. The last moments of the film show images of people in New York going about their daily lives, unaware of the coming disaster. 

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