Who wants to live forever?
10 survival films that make us feel alive
We’ve got Sandra Bullock free-floating in space and Robert Redford adrift in a sinking boat. Even Tom Hanks is back in survival mode this season as a cargo captain held at gunpoint.
It’s only just begun and this year’s Oscar race is already looking more like a Darwinian contest of the fittest as every brand of celebrity — from Sly Stallone to Chiwetel Ejiofor — is looking to beat extinction on the big screen.
We like survival stories because by putting us in proximity to death, we naturally feel more alive.
No wonder moviemakers are pushing the existential envelope: Without wars, disease or immediate famine, we need a sudsy mug of mortality to put us back in our pathetic little place, a reminder of the simple miracle of being alive.
A good survival movie can do just that, but finding the right balance of light and dark, divine comedy and human pathos, isn’t easy. You have to get the right character in just the right life-threatening situation for the mortal magic to work. So whether it’s death in the form of an alien with an expanding mandible, or a banjo-playing hillbilly, here’s a list of some notable movie showdowns with the Grim Reaper.
■ Alien (1979): Essentially a modern twist on the timeless shipwreck story, Sigourney Weaver stands front and centre as Ripley, who survives one encounter after another with a hostile alien predator. This Ridley Scott science-fiction thriller found the perfect balance between strength and vulnerability, heart and mind.
■ The Old Man and the Sea (1958): He strove for muscular prose, but Ernest Hemingway was always a little limp and dewy when it came to romanticizing death. In The Old Man and the Sea, Spencer Tracy pulls off what is essentially a single-hander as an old Cuban fisherman who hauls in the biggest catch of his life, but gets pulled into open water during the chase — and is forced to watch his prize fish eaten by scavengers when he has no means of getting home.
■ 127 Hours (2010): James Franco plays real-life survivor Aron Ralston in Danny Boyle’s breathless tale of desperation. Though the self-amputation scene garnered a lot of ink during its release, the real tug of this survival epic lies in its unspoken appreciation of life itself. Franco scored a 2010 Oscar nomination for his efforts, but lost to a stuttering Colin Firth in The King’s Speech.
■ The Pianist (2002): When a can of pickles and a loaf of bread start to look like the most delicious meal under the sun, you know you’ve successfully entered an alternate universe — which is the only way to describe Roman Polanski’s world view. A survivor of the Holocaust himself, Polanski brings unparalleled depth and context to this true story of a concert pianist who survived the Warsaw ghettos by hiding, starving and befriending good people.
■ Cast Away (2000): Tom Hanks holds us captive on a deserted island for the duration as he plays a FedEx employee who survives a plane crash and washes up on a tropical shore. Director Robert Zemeckis keeps us on the voyage because Hanks is the perfect Everyman, and watching him fight to stay alive and sane was better than any episode of Survivor because he never lost his moral centre.
■ Dead Calm (1989): Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill play a happily married couple on a yacht. Their big mistake is helping a stranded sailor (Billy Zane) who soon takes over their vessel and holds them hostage. With more heart-pounding suspense than most thrillers, Dead Calm keeps the life-death struggle in our face, but it also uses the selfsacrificing force of romantic love to give it emotional ballast.
■ Deliverance (1972): John Boorman’s generation-defining classic about a group of friends who decide to take a once-in-a-lifetime trip down a river that’s about to be flooded for a dam project, taking an entire way of hillbilly life with it. James Dickey’s script touches on the dynamic between man and the natural world. The muscular men (Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds) do their best to resist the natural forces, but nature is always there to humble them anew.
■ 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): If you’ve seen Gravity, you know how effective space is as existential metaphor. In Stanley Kubrick’s space masterpiece, we watch Dave (Keir Dullea) struggle to survive Hal — the on-board computer that is putting Dave’s survival at risk. It’s drawn as a man-versus-machine story, but Hal is just an extension of our superego — forcing our astronaut to connect with a more primitive, life-appreciating state of being.
■ Life of Pi (2012): Following the dependable shipwreck design, we get on a life boat with a young boy, a tiger and a host of other animals. The denouement is surreal, but the life-death struggle is always in the frame as our young hero is forced to face his own mortality, as represented by the gorgeous Bengal tiger who sees him as tomorrow’s dinner.
■ Papillon (1973): Every survival story is a prison movie of one sort or another, but this Dalton Trumbo script (based on Henri Charriere’s bestseller) takes place in an actual prison. Steve McQueen plays Papillon, a man sentenced to a remote island prison where men are never released. They die in their cells. Franklin J. Schaffner makes us starve alongside his central character and savour every cockroach along the way. The only thing that makes life endurable is the fantasy of escape, and the freedom that comes when one overcomes our innate fear of the big finish.