Over four days, Phillips and his crew navigated an increasingly fraught hostage situation, involving numerous escape attempts and multiple onboard fatalities. Tom Hanks stars as the titular Richard Phillips, the captain of an American cargo ship seized by Somali pirates. Safety concerns were heightened on set because of Holland and the other child actors.ĭirected by Paul Greengrass, “Captain Phillips” is controversial not for its content, but because the film’s real-life inspirations disagree about what happened during the 2009 Maersk Alabama hijacking. Massive sets incorporating thousands of gallons of water were used to convincingly recreate the perilous landscape the tsunami’s real survivors faced. It appears on this list in spite of that choice for its significant artistic achievements, reflected in real survivors’ defenses of the film arguing its accuracy merits significant praise. Starring Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor, “The Impossible” has been criticized for focusing its story on a white family when the real events disproportionately impacted the native people of Southeast Asia. She survived the event with her husband and three sons, later returning as an on-set consultant in many of the same locations where her family was vacationing when the 9.3-magnitude earthquake hit. Bayona (“Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom”), the film is based on Spanish physician María Belón’s harrowing experience. But survival stories work best when every frame feels like a passive threat to the protagonist’s existence.įourteen-year-old Tom Holland makes his feature film debut in “The Impossible,” an epic dramatization of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster that claimed nearly 230,000 lives. Sure, “ Cast Away,” “ The Revenant,” and epic sagas like them are sweeping in scope with the lengthy running times to match. Even in lighter survival fare, such as “Swiss Family Robinson,” filmmakers have to keep up the pace and pressure to deliver the subgenre’s characteristic urgency. The best survival films immerse viewers in life-or-death scenarios, balancing realism and believability with slow-burn suspense.

What’s more, they challenge viewers to look inward and consider what truly matters when the chips are down. These stories allow audiences to consider what specific obstacles along one person’s quest for survival and happiness say about humanity writ large. From “Gravity ” and “Wild” to “The Way Back” and “Jaws,” the most compelling survival movies fearlessly examine characters’ will to live, imbuing their perilous struggles with the intensely personal motivations and desires that make every person unique.

Where was the movie cast away filmed