Survival: 43

The film flashes between musher Leonhard Seppala raising his dog Togo and the 1925 serum run to Nome. In 1913, Seppala and his wife Constance welcome a newborn Siberian Husky puppy to their sledding dog pack in Nome, Alaska. While Seppala insists on immediately retiring him due to his small and weak state, Constance is strongly supportive of the puppy. The young dog turns out to be close to unmanageable, and refuses to stay at home when the other dogs are working. He constantly escapes when left in the kennel, and seeks out Seppala’s dog team, causing great disruption to Seppala’s training routine. After trying to get rid of the Husky twice, the young dog escapes by ...

Overgård is stranded in the Arctic Circle waiting for rescue, living in his crashed plane. His daily routine consists of checking fishing lines, mapping his surroundings and running a distress beacon powered by a hand-crank dynamo. One day, his supply of fish is raided by a polar bear. A helicopter responds to his beacon and attempts to land, but crashes. The pilot is killed and the passenger, is severely injured and unconscious. Overgård dresses her wound and takes her to his plane. She does not speak English and only proves her alertness by squeezing his hand. Overgård returns to the wreckage of the downed helicopter and finds some food, a propane ...

The film opens with an unspecified year but is probably around WWII, as the rifle he carries appears to be a German KAR98, which was introduced in 1935 as the standard German infantry rifle. It is possible he could have obtained it during the Spanish Civil War, ca. 1936 to 1939, but it would have been a German frontline weapon at that time. The local townspeople do not appear to have all the modern comforts of the era with exception of electricity. The main character Martinon is a huntsman who lives a life of solitude completely without modern day comforts high on a mountain top in an abandoned town, which appears to have been ravaged by war. Martinon’s life is that of ...

After their flight is canceled due to stormy weather, neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Bass and photojournalist Alex Martin hire private pilot Walter to get them from Idaho to Denver for connecting flights to Alex’s wedding in New York and Ben’s emergency surgery appointment in Baltimore. Walter, who has not filed a flight plan, suffers a fatal stroke mid-flight, and the plane crashes on a mountaintop in the High Uintas Wilderness. Ben, Alex, and Walter’s Labrador Retriever survive the crash but Alex has injured her leg quite badly. Ben attends to her cuts and injured knee, and buries the pilot while she is unconscious. Once conscious, Alex ...

In early 1980s, an Israeli adventurer named Yossi Ghinsberg travels to Bolivia planning to journey into the heart of the Amazon rainforest. There, he meets Marcus Stamm, a Swiss school teacher, and his friend Kevin Gale, an American hiker and avid photographer. The three are staying in La Paz, at an Israeli community hostel. Yossi is out in the market one day where a stranger asks if he is an American; Yossi replies ”no”. During conversation the Austrian stranger, Karl Ruprechter, claims the existence of an indigenous tribe in the jungle that they should go see. Karl says he knows the jungle, and he is friends with the tribe. Yossi, excited about ...

The film is set in the 1960s, during the Cold War and the Space Race between Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviets plan to send a man into space. During the construction of the craft, a technician is killed and the engineers question the safety of the craft. A test vehicle, representing the Voskhod 2 spacecraft, breaks up in flight two weeks before the official launch and Soviet engineers cannot identify the causes of the explosion and sudden loss of communication. Ex-WW2 pilot, Pavel Belyayev, and military test pilot Alexei Leonov are called to man the craft, but during a skydive Pavel injuries his leg landing and is considered unfit. He is replaced by a new, young, and ...

6 Below: Miracle on the Mountain is a 2017 American survival drama film directed by Scott Waugh and written by Madison Turner, based on the non-fiction book Crystal Clear by Eric LeMarque and Davin Seay. It stars Josh Hartnett, Mira Sorvino, Sarah Dumont and Jason Cottle, and tells the true ...

Dozens of people from Copiapó, Chile, work in the San José mine. The owner ignores the warnings of the failing stability of the mine, which collapses a short time later. The only path inside the mine is completely blocked, and the thirty-three miners manage to get to the rescue chamber. They discover that the radio is useless, the medical kit is empty, the ventilation shafts lack the required ladders, and there is very little stored food. Mario Sepúlveda becomes the leader of the miners, dividing the foods rations and stopping the outbursts of violence and despair. The mine company does not attempt any rescue, and the relatives of the miners gather around the gates.

In 1850, author Herman Melville visits innkeeper Thomas Nickerson, the last survivor of the sinking of the whaleship Essex, offering money in return for his story. Nickerson initially refuses, but then finally agrees when his wife intervenes. The story turns to 1820: a whaling company in Nantucket has refitted the Essex to participate in the lucrative whale oil trade, and 14-year-old Nickerson signs on as a cabin boy. The owners hire veteran whaler Owen Chase as first mate, though he is disappointed not to receive a captain’s commission. The captain is George Pollard, an inexperienced mariner from an established whaling family who envies Chase’s skill and popularity. Chase ...

In 2035, the crew of the Ares III mission to Mars is exploring Acidalia Planitia on Martian solar day (sol) 18 of their 31-sol expedition. A severe dust storm threatens to topple their Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV). The mission is scrubbed, but as the crew evacuates, astronaut Mark Watney is struck by debris. The telemetry from his suit’s bio-monitor is damaged and Watney is presumed dead. With the MAV on the verge of toppling, the remaining crew takes off for their orbiting vessel, the Hermes. Watney awakens after the storm, injured and with a low-oxygen warning. He returns to the crew’s surface habitat (“Hab”) and treats his ...

During late 1823, Hugh Glass guides Captain Andrew Henry’s trappers through the territory of the present-day Dakotas. While he and his half-Pawnee son, Hawk, are hunting, the company’s camp is attacked by an Arikara war party which is seeking to recover its Chief’s abducted daughter, Powaqa. Many of the trappers are killed during the fight, while the rest of them escape onto a boat. Guided by Glass, the survivors travel on foot to Fort Kiowa, because he believes that traveling downriver will make them vulnerable. After docking, the crew stashes the pelts near the shore. While scouting game, Glass is mauled by a grizzly bear and ...

During an April 1943 bombing mission against the Japanese-held island of Nauru, Louis “Louie” Zamperini is flying as a bombardier of a United States Army Air Forces B-24 Liberator bomber when his plane is damaged in combat and a number of the crew injured. The pilot brings the aircraft to a stop at the end of the runway despite suffering an exploded tire. In a flashback to his early youth as an Italian-American boy in Torrance, California, Louie misbehaves by stealing, drinking liquor and smoking. He is often picked on by others for his Italian ethnicity. His brother Peter sees how fast Louie can run and decides to train him to be a runner. Louie begins to learn discipline ...

In June 1995, despite a lack of hiking experience, recent divorcée Cheryl Strayed leaves Minneapolis, Minnesota, to hike 1,100 miles (1,800 km) of the 2,650-mile (4,260 km) Pacific Crest Trail on a journey of self-discovery and healing. During the hike, Strayed reflects in flashbacks on her childhood in Minnesota and memories of her mother, Bobbi Grey. Bobbi’s death from cancer sent Cheryl into a deep depression that she tried to numb with heroin and anonymous sex, eventually destroying her marriage to her husband Paul. After finding out she was pregnant, she got an abortion and resolved to hike the trail to redeem herself. Strayed begins her ...

Alex prepares to take his girlfriend Jen camping for the weekend. When they arrive, a park ranger tells them the trail Alex wanted to take is closed and suggests they hike elsewhere; Alex refuses a map, confident that he knows the park well. After a canoe trip down river, Alex injures his foot. Night falls and they set up camp. During dinner, they encounter a tour guide called Brad who flirts with Jen, which irritates Alex. Brad implies he would be more suited to take Jen on a hike. Though Alex and Jen initially planned on not hiking far, the next morning Alex decides to go off-trail, deeper into the park where Alex remembers there is a lake with a waterfall. On the way, he spots a ...

The film begins with a flash-forward in which a man, played by Robert Redford, narrates a letter addressing people he will miss, as the camera pans across a lost shipping container. In the Indian Ocean eight days earlier, the man wakes to find water flooding his boat. It has collided with a wayward shipping container, ripping a hole in the hull. The man uses a sea anchor to dislodge the container, then changes course to tilt the boat away from the hole. He patches the hole and uses a manual bilge pump to remove the water from the cabin. The boat’s navigational and communications systems have been damaged by saltwater intrusion. The man tries to repair the marine radio and ...

Tracks is a 2013 Australian drama film directed by John Curran and starring Mia Wasikowska and Adam Driver. It is an adaptation of Robyn Davidson’s memoir of the same name, chronicling the author’s nine-month journey on camels across the Australian desert. It was shown at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentation) and the 70th Venice International Film Festival 2013 (in Official Competition). It premiered in Australia as the opening film at the Adelaide Film Festival on 10 October 2013. The film ...

The Space Shuttle Explorer, commanded by veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski, is in Earth orbit to service the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Dr. Ryan Stone is aboard on her first space mission, to perform a set of hardware upgrades on the Hubble. During a spacewalk, Mission Control in Houston warns Explorer’s crew about a rapidly-expanding cloud of space debris accidentally caused by the Russians having shot down a presumed defunct spy satellite (see Kessler syndrome), and order the crew to return to Earth immediately. Communication with Mission Control is lost shortly thereafter as more communication satellites are knocked out by the debris.

The film is the dramatized story of Thor Heyerdahl and his Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947. While the prevailing theories of the time held that Polynesia had been settled by peoples migrating from the west, Heyerdahl, an experimental ethnographer and adventurer, sets out to prove his theory that people from South America settled the islands in pre-Columbian times. Noting similarities between statues found in South America and the Polynesian moai, Heyerdahl’s theory about the origin of the Polynesian people is bolstered by Polynesian folklore that tells of an ancient tribe called the Hanau epe that are said to have once inhabited Easter Island. ...

In Canada, a young writer meets Pi Patel. The writer has been told that Pi’s life story would be a good subject for a book. Pi tells the writer the following story about his life: Pi’s father names him Piscine Molitor Patel after the swimming pool in France. In secondary school in Pondicherry, he adopts the name “Pi” (the Greek letter, π) to avoid the sound-alike nickname “Pissing Patel”. He is raised in a Hindu family, but at 12 years old, he is introduced to Christianity and then Islam, and decides to follow all three religions as he “just wants to love God”. His mother supports his desire to grow, but his rationalist father tries to ...

Seventeen-year-old Joshua “Josh” McGuire, expedition bank-roller Carl Hurley and his girlfriend, Victoria “Vic” Elaine, travel to the Esa’ala Cave, an underwater cave exploration site in Papua New Guinea. Josh’s father, Frank, a master diver, has already established a forward base camp at a lower level inside the cave, where the team has been exploring for weeks. As Josh voices his disdain for his father and his opinions about cave exploration, the team below prepares to dive into an unexplored area of the system. While exploring the entrance to the new system, Judes experiences a problem with her air tank hose. ...