Terminator 2: Judgment Day:

Sarah Connor herself decides to explain the first movie, and the background of the second movie to us, while robots slaughter people and her scarred son scowls at us. (That glimpse of Future John packs more punch than five hours of Bale, incidentally.)

Robot Jox:

An all-time classic movie, this Joe Haldeman/Stuart Gordon joint starts out with a gruff voiceover packing everything we need to know about robotic single combat into one speech. With rubble.

Slipstream:

This opening monologue from Steve Lisberger's followup to Tron almost belongs in the "what the hell are you talking about" category. What the Hell? Earthquakes, okay. And then they "merged civilizations together?" But then there's a wind that ate everything. And someone is traveling it. Wha?

2019: After The Fall Of New York:

This one wins extra points for having the synthesizery blues score, and the guy in the trenchcoat pretending that the synthesizer is actually his trumpet. Twenty years after the bombs fell, New York is still a shithole. Sorry.

Doomsday:

This actually isn't the entire opening voiceover of this film, because it continues after about five minutes of people being shot by riot cops. Scotland gets turned into a scabby plague sore, and those sensible Brits wall it off. Which works out perfectly, of course.

Judge Dredd:

Can I just say, I love it when a voiceover comes with a text crawl, in case you need to follow along at home? Most movies do one or the other, but only a truly great movie has a text crawl and a voiceover. The U.S. has gone to mega-shit with Megacities, and a new breed of law enforcer rises up.

City Of Ember:

The movie's entire backstory is compressed into a couple of minutes. Global disaster, underground city, box of instructions... box gets lost. Oh noes.

The Road Warrior:

Thanks to John Hazard for finding this online. Still the greatest post-apocalyptic movie opening of all time.

Endgame: Bronx Lotta Finale is what Samuel Beckett would have done, if he'd been clever enough to think of monkey guys with machine guns. (And if he'd been albe to let go of that whole "trashcan" obsession.) Yet another classic Italian Mad Max ripoff, in the vein of 2019: After The Fall Of New York and Bronx Warriors, Endgame is a cut above the rest. First of all, there's the title. What does "Bronx Lotta Finale" mean? It's not the Italian title, which is either Endgame: Gioco Finale or Il Mutanti. (According to Google Translate, "Lotta Finale" is Italian for "Final Fight." But I still think someone thought it sounded good in English, like "It's not just a little finale, it's a lotta finale!")

Anyway, this movie has everything. If it's not there, it's obviously something movies don't need. In a nutshell, it's a post-apocalyptic future, and the tattered remains of society are kept entertained by a Running Man-esque game where a handful of guys track the most dangerous prey in an urban environment... and whoever survives is the winner. There's plenty of post-apocalyptic city chasing and fighting action, and then a telepath named Lilith recruits the baddest urban gladiator to help her and her fellow mutants get out of the city, to reach a kind of sanctuary thingy. They have to travel across the post-apocalyptic landscape, full of evil mutants, to reach their goal. But first, our hero, Shannon, has to go around recruiting people to be on his team. People with names like "Ninja" and "the sharpshooter with the eyepatch." Cue dialogue like, "His name is Ninja. And he doesn't socialize."

After many unfortunate post-apocalyptic run-ins, the telepath Lilith gets captured and tied up by a fish-headed mutant, who says stuff to her like, "You sure know how to turn a guy on." And then he falls asleep, at which point the good guys rescue her and kill the fish guy. (As you can see in the clip above.) And they face the eternal dilemma: what do you do about the guy the mutants have embedded in concrete except for his hands and face?

But anyway, despite having everything, Endgame is at heart a Mad Max clone, so you get some amazing rumble-in-a-quarry sequences like this one, where everybody looks at each other for like ten minutes before they all jump on their motorcycles, dune buggies, space cars and RVs, and try to kill the shit out of each other. Oh, and this second clip is probably NSFW, due to a glimpse of mostly naked people wearing yellow socks on a post-apocalyptic dune buggy:

Why are they all just staring at each other? Are they like, "Should we do this? I don't know if we should do this or not. Do you want to do this? I wish I'd put sparklers on my bike wheels if I'd known today was going to be gravel-quarry-rumble day." Oh, and I love the monkey guy in the turtleneck. He's on his way to an art gallery opening after this.

There's been a nuclear holocaust ("They baked the Big Apple," one character remarks) and now New York is full of punk-rock mutants, whom the ruling Eurasian bastards hunt on horseback. There hasn't been a child born in nearly 20 years, but this woman with the awesomely feathered hair has viable eggs, so the rebels want to spirit her away to Alpha Centauri with a whole host of virile men. (But via test tube, not the old-fashioned way.) This clip also includes the great sequence when the evil cyborg leader gets a new eyeball, with crushed ice on his face, because... well, just because, okay? Anyway, final proof the post-apocalyptic genre has gained a bit more dignity since 1983.