The 15 Best Survival Movies Of All Time, Ranked

Few cinematic productions are more captivating than a good old-fashioned survival film. Whether they’re surviving the wilderness somewhere far away from civilization or trapped inside a manmade disaster, there’s just something about a protagonist clinging desperately to the will to live that feels universally inspiring. It’s humanity at its best. 

Despite all of our technology and the illusion that humans have somehow conquered nature, these films remind us how tenuous our collective grasp over the forces of land and sea truly is. Throw in an epic backdrop or some spectacular sets, a little superhuman ingenuity, a soaring orchestral score, and a famous face or two, and you’ve got a recipe for a blockbuster survival film. From tales of adventurers who got more than they bargained for to survival showdowns with the very ocean itself, here are the 15 best survival films you don’t want to miss, according to the audiences and critics posting on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb. 

Like the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel, some of the best disaster survival movies are the ones about humanity’s hubris — and 1974’s “The Towering Inferno” is one of the original greats in this class. The film was produced by Irwin Allen, dubbed the “Master of Disaster” for his work on this film and the 1972 hit “The Poseidon Adventure,” and stars a laundry list of huge actors that includes Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, William Holden, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, and Richard Chamberlain. O.J. Simpson even makes an appearance in this box office smash. 

The film revolves around the rise and fall of the ill-fated Glass Tower, a 138-story San Francisco skyscraper that may or may not have had a few corners cut in the building process. As the christening gala kicks off in the 135th floor’s Promenade Room, somewhere in a corner of the 81st floor a small electrical fire quickly turns into a blaze. Much of the story revolves around the efforts of Fire Chief Michael O’Hallorhan (McQueen) to save as many lives as possible, which involves, at various points, rappelling down an elevator shaft and the world’s most death-defying zipline. It’s thrilling, intense, and full of shade for skeezy corporate types. 

“Nowhere” is a Spanish-language Netflix film that mostly revolves around Mia (Anna Castillo), a pregnant woman stranded inside a cargo container in the middle of the ocean. The film is framed in a vague dystopian narrative that mainly serves as exposition to explain how and why this woman is stranded and how much she wants to fight for her unborn child. Under a resource crisis, the now-totalitarian Spanish government has begun rounding up anyone they perceive as a drain on society in an effort to whittle down the population to a more manageable size: namely, senior citizens, kids, and pregnant women. 

After losing their first child to this genocide, the visibly pregnant Mia and her husband Nico (Tamar Nicos) hide her condition while paying traffickers to smuggle them out via cargo container. After they are separated into two separate containers, they are caught at a military checkpoint where everyone is killed except Mia, who narrowly escapes by hiding on top of some cargo. Things only get worse for her from there when her cargo container, now stacked on a ship, falls into the ocean during a storm. 

With quality cinematography and more than capable acting in what quickly becomes Castillo’s one-woman survival show, we follow Mia’s survival journey using only her wits, a rapidly dying phone, and the contents of her crates. And it’s all under the dual ticking time bombs of her pregnant belly and the slowly-filling container.

If you love survival movies and you’re a dog lover, “Eight Below” is your film. The 2006 canine survival thriller follows a pack of sled dogs as they struggle to stay alive after a science mission goes south. After a 1993 mission to retrieve a rare meteorite via dog sled, a storm hits, forcing the human crew’s rapid evacuation. As the conditions for extracting the eight snow dogs become unsafe, the pack are abandoned to fend for themselves, still chained together outside the base camp. 

Over the ensuing six months, the pack must stay alive in the Antarctic, urviving in freezing conditions and hunting for food together in a land where prey is scarce, as their handler Jerry Shepard (Paul Walker) tries to convince anyone who will listen to send him back for the dogs. Unlike today, when animal movies are filmed using heavy CGI, this 2006 movie was filmed with real working Siberian Huskies and Alaskan Malamutes, adding a sense of realism to the story. Be prepared to cry.

If you’re into dark post-apocalyptic movies and harrowing tales of survival, the 2009 film “The Road” is a bleak and ominous tale of a father and son just trying to get by in a world turned to absolute horror. At the beginning of the film, some undetermined cataclysmic event appears to have long since transformed the United States into a gray, dismal hellscape where most flora and fauna are a thing of the past. Without things like McDonald’s or even good, old-fashioned foraging to sustain them, the general population has devolved into roving bands of armed cannibals. 

The tale follows the journey of an unnamed man (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they trudge through this miserable reality, surviving on looted goods like the “Fallout” Sole Survivor. Many people die because humanity is the worst, and the poor kid has an ever-growing pile of trauma to work through. But it’s somehow a beautiful film, thanks in large part to John Hillcoat’s gritty direction and outstanding cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe, best known for his work on “The Others” and “Thor: Ragnarok.”

The epic tale of real-world historical figure Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), “The Revenant” follows 1823 fur trappers through Dakota territory during the Arikara War. While camped out with their hunting party, Glass and his half-Native son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) find their group under attack by Arikara warriors in search of the white men who abducted their chief’s daughter. After initially escaping by boat, the survivors set out on foot to Fort Kiowa. When Glass is mauled by a grizzly bear while hunting, most the group leaves him for dead, with only his son, a young trapper named Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), and John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) remaining behind to tend to his body. Things only get worse after the greedy Fitzgerald kills Hawk while his father helplessly looks on.

This 2015 movie has everything: a grim winter wilderness palette, grisly frontier medicine, and hallucination-induced epiphanies. The film absolutely cleaned up at the awards ceremonies, racking up Oscars for best cinematography, best directing, and best actor for Leonardo DiCaprio. In fact, the role was so grueling that DiCaprio needed time off after making “The Revenant.”

One of the most surprising things about the 2022 survival film “Fall” is exactly how much story the writers manage to get out of a logline about two girls getting stuck on top of a TV tower. The movie begins with some degree of back story, about protagonist Becky Connor (Grace Caroline Currey) losing her husband Dan (Mason Gooding) in a rock-climbing accident. In an effort to drag Becky out of the dumps, her bestie Shiloh (Virginia Gardner) has a great idea: climbing a 2,000-foot decommissioned TV tower to scatter his ashes from the top. 

Becky agrees, and the pair eagerly take to ascending the suspiciously rusty piece of Americana to its peak. But after a moment of triumph relishing in their accomplishment, a chunk of sketchy ladder breaks off, leaving the duo stranded at the top and dropping the backpack with their supplies on a satellite dish below them. And the best part? They can’t get any cell phone service. It’s a ridiculous premise but an absolutely terrifying one, and a surprising twist ending makes it even better. 

A perfect movie to pair with “Eight Below,” “The Grey” is about a group of humans being hunted by a pack of grey wolves in the Alaskan tundra. But unlike that other, more inspiring dog movie, this film is so bleak that it left film critic Roger Ebert feeling haunted to the point that he walked out of another movie the same day.

The 2011 film stars Liam Neeson as John Ottway, a sharpshooter who protects oil workers from the local wolf population. After their flight to Anchorage crashes, Ottway and his fellow survivors are forced to shelter in the wreckage but immediately find themselves stalked by a local wolf pack. Convinced it’s a territory thing, they retreat to the woods only to find the wolves following. But that’s just the beginning of their troubles, which involve a blizzard, a canyon, a river, and everything else the Alaskan wilderness has to throw at them.

The earlier film produced by disaster legend Irwin Allen, 1972’s “The Poseidon Adventure” deals with one of humanity’s most wretched inventions: the cruise ship. On its final voyage before being scrapped, the aging ocean liner the S.S. Poseidon has a full passenger manifest and new corporate owners eager to cut a few corners by sailing full speed ahead to Athens despite the good captain’s warnings. Still, everything appears to be going fine — that is, right up until the ship’s New Year’s Eve celebration is interrupted by a tsunami that capsizes the vessel, trapping its occupants inside a sinking, upside-down ship with only its outer hull remaining above water. 

As the ship gradually floods one compartment at a time, the survivors must try to stay ahead, traveling through corridors and chambers toward a space with no exit. Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Shelley Winters, and Leslie Nielsen star in the thrilling adventure. Although the film yielded a sequel (1979’s “Beyond the Poseidon Adventure”) and a couple of remakes through the years, nothing beats the original. Watching it should be a New Year’s Eve tradition.

For those of us working a regular old desk job, “Deepwater Horizon” is one of those epic disaster survival films that puts into perspective how seriously hardcore the folks are who help bring us something as mundane as the fuel for our cars and homes. Based on the real-world 2010 disaster that saw the eponymous oil rig go up in flames, killing 11 workers and spilling four million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the 2016 film stars Mark Wahlberg, Gina Rodriguez, Kate Hudson, Kurt Russell, and John Malkovich.

Told mostly through the perspective of Chief Electronics Technician Michael “Mike” Williams (Wahlberg), the film emphasizes the shortcuts made under the direction of BP corporate that are responsible for causing the disaster. When the cement seal closing the well on a high-pressure reservoir fails, a blowout is triggered, leading to a chain reaction that worsens when the oil is ignited. The harrowing film follows the survivors’ efforts to escape the mighty blaze as they wait for rescue from the Coast Guard.

Underlined by an outstanding and soulful score performed by Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, 2007’s “Into the Wild” is a biopic recounting the slow, sad Alaskan wilderness death of Christopher McCandless, the young adventurer known for traveling under the pseudonym “Alexander Supertramp.” Disenchanted by the privilege and social trappings of modern life, McCandless (Emile Hirsch) emancipates himself from money, making his way across the American countryside to take in all of the various adventures that await him along the way. 

The film recounts his adventures and trials as he takes work in South Dakota, kayaks down the Colorado River, and spends time with wanderers and hippies he meets on his journey. Convinced he can handle it, McCandless heads to the Alaskan wilderness, where he is enraptured by its natural beauty and the pure joy of living out there alone. But when a calculation error leaves him unable to pass back over the river, McCandless is forced to retreat to an abandoned bus where he must struggle to survive as long as he can. “Into the Wild” was adapted from a book about the real McCandless by director Sean Penn, who was captivated by the tale after reading it. 

Based on the true survival story recounted in canyoneer Aron Ralston’s 2004 memoir “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” “127 Hours” recounts the time Ralston spent trapped between a boulder and the wall of a slot canyon in 2003, ultimately amputating his own arm to escape rather than die. Directed by Danny Boyle and starring James Franco as Ralston in one of his finest performances, the 2010 film is set in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park where the nightmare unfolded. Without telling anyone he knew where he was heading, Ralston sets off for a handful of Canyonlands adventures. But as he is making his way through a slot canyon, an 800-pound boulder comes loose, pinning Ralston by his arm to the canyon wall. 

Realizing he is stuck and alone and no one is coming to help, the canyoneer starts a video record of his efforts to chip away at the immovable boulder with a knife and rig a futile pulley system. After a few days of surviving on rations and something other than water, he starts to realize it’s time to take more drastic steps. Distressing and inspirational, this film is a reminder that not all people are made of the same stuff. 

Directed and produced by Ang Lee of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “Brokeback Mountain” fame, “Life of Pi” is a fantasy tale about a man named Pi (Irrfan Khan) recounting his strange life including, notably, his shipwreck survival with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. After growing up in a family zoo in Pondicherry, India, the teenage Pi (Suraj Sharma) and his family flee the period of dictatorship under Prime Minister Indira Ghandi’s rule, known as “The Emergency,” aboard a Japanese freighter when a storm causes it to capsize. 

Narrowly fleeing as his family drowns, the young Pi finds himself in a lifeboat with a quartet of animals: Richard Parker the tiger, an orangutan, a hyena, and a zebra. After the hyena kills the orangutan and the zebra, Richard Parker finishes him off, leaving just Pi and the tiger stranded together at sea. Not content to become Richard Parker’s next meal, Pi creates a secondary raft and takes to fishing for the tiger’s meals. A strange, vibrant, gorgeous yarn about finding wonder in tragedy, 2012’s “Life of Pi” is fascinating adaptation of a book that should not have been filmable.   

“Rescue Dawn” is an epic Vietnam War survival film by German filmmaking legend Werner Herzog about the real German-American pilot and prisoner of war Dieter Dengler, who survived life in a Laotian prison camp beginning in 1966. Starring Christian Bale as Dengler and Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies as his fellow soldiers, the harrowing yet eventually uplifting 2006 film follows their life in imprisonment and ensuing escape. 

The story begins with the United States’ bombing of Laos. A U.S. Navy pilot with the USS Ranger aircraft carrier, Dengler finds himself shot down and stranded behind enemy lines. Although he survives the crash, Dengler is captured by the Pathet Lao, or the Lao People’s Liberation Army, and placed in a prison camp. It’s there that he meets fellow prisoners Gene DeBruin (Davies) and Duane W. Martin (Zahn), surviving together until they eventually realize their only hope is to make a break for it while they still can and instead take their chances with the Laotian countryside. 

Considered by many to be the first reasonably realistic attempt at portraying Mars as it might exist, “The Martian” takes the survival genre to new heights by setting its drama on the red planet. The epic 2015 Ridley Scott space adventure stars Matt Damon as astronaut Mark Watney, a guy who finds himself surviving alone on Mars after a mishap leaves him stranded there. While exploring the Martian plain Acidalia Planitia, Watney’s crew is caught up in a dust storm that slams Watney with flying debris. Believing him dead and pressed for time, the rest of the crew departs, leaving Watney alone with a four-year window before the next Earth ship arrives. 

Retreating to a makeshift habitat, Watney begins to document his life and experiences cultivating food from the crew’s waste and water from jet fuel. The southern Jordan region that “The Martian” was filmed in really sells the idea of the Martian landscape, making the possibility of Martian colonization, if not death by accidental stranding, seem more possible than ever. 

If you can still look at a volleyball without desperately shouting “Wilson!” it’s probably time to add “Cast Away” to your movie night watch list. “Cast Away” imagines Tom Hanks as Chuck Noland, a work-loving FedEx systems analyst with an unaddressed toothache and a girlfriend he never has time for (Helen Hunt). But his job takes a back seat to other, more pressing matters when, after skipping out on Christmas festivities for yet another FedEx emergency, Chuck survives a cargo plane crash en route to Malaysia and finds himself washed up on a deserted island in the Pacific with nothing but his FedEx packages to sustain him. 

Although he doesn’t find much in the way of food, Chuck does find (and subsequently befriend) a volleyball whose company sustains him through some pretty dark times. Forced back to the basics, Chuck learns to live off the land and even conduct his own dental clinic when necessary. A thrilling man-versus-nature adventure, the 2000 film killed at the box office, proving that Tom Hanks and his emotional support volleyball are capable of carrying an entire film almost entirely alone.