Set in a 1999 that diverged from our timeline fifteen years prior, City Limits depicts an American landscape devastated by a mysterious pandemic that selectively killed the adult population. The resulting power vacuum has been filled by tribalized youth gangs who have partitioned the ruins of Los Angeles into distinct territories. These groups, such as the Clippers and the DAs, have abandoned traditional history, instead basing their social structures, iconography, and moral codes on salvaged comic books and remnants of 20th-century pop culture.

The central conflict emerges not from inter-gang warfare, but from the arrival of the Sunya Corporation. This entity represents a proto-corporate revival, attempting to impose order through technological superiority and economic exploitation. Sunya’s strategy involves inciting conflict between gangs to weaken them before forcibly conscripting the survivors as a labor force for urban reconstruction. The film’s Earth is a world of "orphans" where the infrastructure of the old world—motorcycles, fuel, and electricity—remains functional but is treated with a semi-ritualistic reverence by a generation that never learned how to build it.

The film’s vision of 1999 correctly identified the rise of private military contractors and corporate overreach in urban planning, though it missed the digital revolution entirely. While its "adult-only" plague remains a fantastical trope, the depiction of remote-controlled drones (used as explosive delivery systems in the climax) offers a striking early parallel to modern loitering munitions. Comparisons to real-world outcomes show a divergence in cultural evolution; while the film predicted a return to physical tribalism and print-media worship, the actual 1990s saw the birth of the globalized internet, which replaced the film's localized, gang-based information silos with digital connectivity.