When Nature Calls: Survival Movies on the Big Screen

It’s one thing to say that a movie can deal with the idea of “staying alive.” Tons of movies—from dramas to thrillers to outright horror stories—ask the audience if the protagonist can stay alive. Aside from creature features and post-apocalyptic wastelands, there are some survival movies out there that just deal with that age-old conflict: humans versus nature.

The script collection gathers some of the best screenplays that features people pitted against the elements around them: weather, wildlife, and circumstance. Stories like that can involve triumph or disaster, but they all seek to pit a person against Mother Nature. It’s the oldest conflict we know as humans, and it’s satisfying to watch survival movies on the big screen with well-written stories like these.

Scripts from this Article

Cast Away

Into The Wild

Buried

127 Hours

Life of Pi

Gravity

All Is Lost

Wild

The Revenant

The Martian

The Shallows

Cast Away (2000)

Out in the middle of nowhere, a person can find themselves stranded if the circumstances are right. For Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks), those circumstances involved crashing over the Pacific and finding his way to a remote island, all on his own. Being all alone can have more than the usual effects on a person.

Past the need to eat and protect himself, Chuck finds that he needs interaction as well, befriending a volleyball he names Wilson. As he finds himself “making it” in this new environment, he struggles not just with the elements but with his inner conflicts, including the hope that someone might come and find him.

Into the Wild (2007)

Seeking solace in nature can be risky as we see in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild. The poignant and often harsh realities of a life completely isolated from society are shown against a backdrop of meaningful interactions by Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) in his quest to escape “society.”

A raw challenge against Mother Nature usually isn’t a good way to find your freedom, but McCandless does it anyway, only to find more problems in the wild than he expected.

Buried (2010)

Death never feels so near as when you’re already six feet under. That’s probably what makes the thriller Buried feel so real and so close to home, apart from the fact that it’s a feature-length bottle episode. It feels almost as if the audience can’t leave the claustrophobic conditions of this setting either, because every event in the film is seen only through the eyes of the captive, Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds), with no visibility into what’s happening outside his tiny world. As Paul struggles to stay alive, it’s a delicate balance between maintaining communication and saving his resources underground.

Read More: Script Format: The Essential Elements of a Screenplay

127 Hours (2010)

Endurance becomes a race against time when Aron Ralston (James Franco) finds himself trapped by a boulder in an isolated canyon in Utah. 127 Hours follows not just his physical ordeal but his psychological journey as he weighs his will to live.

This visceral real-life account of the 127 hours that Ralston spent pinned then shows the harrowing decision to amputate himself to save his own life. Ralston’s original title for the autobiography, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, makes a lot of sense when faced with decisions like that.

Life of Pi (2012)

The ocean is a vast waste to someone surviving out there alone. It must feel even larger when stranded with a hungry tiger. Throughout the film Life of Pi, the titular character (Suraj Sharma) and his tiger companion discover this difficult situation as they find themselves in the same boat: they are the sole survivors of a shipwreck.

While the events that happened are expressed to be relatively fictional, questions of reality, truth, and trust are integral to what Pi goes through, as well as how he survives his 227-day journey alongside the big cat.

Gravity (2013)

Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) gets to briefly enjoy her first trip into space before it turns into an absolute nightmare. Stuck in orbit with space veteran Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), the two are forced to think quickly about a way to get back to Earth, all with a clock ticking. As worse comes to worst, it becomes clear that only one of them may survive this trip off-world.

All Is Lost (2013)

Featuring a nearly wordless performance by Robert Redford, his character’s struggle with the vast Indian Ocean offers a masterclass in “show, don’t tell.” From the breach in his ship to the storm on the way, the man (Redford) forays against the sea only gives way to more dangers. Eventually, the man paddles desperately against the near-impossible odds of being saved from his life raft. It’s those odds that make his struggle the perfect visual representation of the human spirit.

Wild (2014)

The key to survival is preparation in most cases. People choose to train, pack, and vet their supplies and knowledge when embarking on adventures into the wild. But when that doesn’t happen, you get something like Wild.

The story follows Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) in a biographical drama that depicts her soul-searching along the Pacific Crest Trail. The journey is an act of desperation. Cheryl arrives on the first leg of her journey without everything she needs. From boots too small to sexual harassment to a stove without the right fuel, Cheryl’s shifting circumstances keep leading her to survive more than she bargained for.

The Revenant (2015)

The Revenant is one of those stories that covers the axiom, “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.” From bear attacks to betrayals, there’s something that happens at every moment of this film to make the chances of survival much worse for Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio). The Revenant blends the epic, dramatic intrigue of a Western with the thriller elements brought by any good survivalist story to create something thoroughly moving.

Read More: 10 Great Westerns That Brought the Western Back During Their Time

The Martian (2015)

Being stranded on a desert island is one thing. Facing a marooning on a desert planet is an entirely different matter. The Martian chronicles the attempts of astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) to survive on Mars after his crew mistakes him for dead. While help is on the way, Watney must find a way to stay alive long enough to be rescued. Come hell or dust storm, there’s plenty to keep him from taking an “easy way out” on this one.

The Shallows (2016)

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, you get a haunting reminder of what lurks beneath the waves. The Shallows is a primal tale of survival, pitting a single person against one of nature’s most fearsome predators.

Unlike in monster-movie thrillers like Jaws, Nancy Adams (Blake Lively) is trying to get back to the shore while a shark is hunting the waters around her. With time running out and the tide rising, Nancy uses wits and endurance to save herself from the dangerous waters below.

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Survival movies focus on the most primal experience we all have hardwired inside us.. As you look at these films, keep your eye on the conflict between people and nature. That’s the one that started it all, the longest-lasting conflict of all time. No wonder it makes for such good stories!

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