7 survival movies you have to see before you die

Staying alive is the primordial prime directive for life. This deep need to survive pushes humans into incredibly dramatic battles with reality. That's why so many of the stories below are true. Near-death narratives strip away the trappings of society and place their heroes into a state of nature. These protagonists are stranded, starving, mauled, and even disfigured. And yet, they take what's left and fight to keep breathing.

 7. Children of Men

Seven years before the dynamic duo of director Alfonso Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki stunned audiences with "Gravity," they constructed "Children of Men." It's another survival classic that deploys their love of elaborately blocked long-take action set-pieces.

"Children of Men" is the story of an unusual plague (maybe?) that suddenly renders humanity infertile. Free society collapses as earth's power structures realize their days are numbered. Clive Owen plays a minor civil servant who finds the possible key to survival: the last pregnant woman. He must usher her to safety in a world gone mad.

This is a grim dystopian future where freedom and moral order are crushed in a massive power grab justified by the coming doom. If the human race has no future, what does right or wrong matter in the present? The gripping and sacrificial survival plot in Cuarón and Lubeski's visual masterpiece is a good case against this nihilistic reasoning.

6. The Pianist

Adrien Brody is one of Hollywood's best actors, but certainly cemented that reputation in his Oscar-winning turn as a Jewish pianist in Poland who survives Hitler's terrifying World War 2 purges.

This achingly beautiful 2002 film is based on the autobiography written by Wladyslaw Szpilman, "The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945." Szpilman is initially forced into the horrifying Nazi-controlled ghettos of Warsaw but eventually hides in the ruins of his city as his people are murdered in the streets, starved to death, or shipped off to death camps.

Brody lost 30 pounds to play the starving Szpilman, who had to scrounge and freeze during his arduous years in hiding. The tall and often muscular actor got down to a horrifying 129 pounds and then gained it all back during filming because the "The Pianist," like many productions, was shot in reverse order. Brody also learned large portions of Chopin compositions by heart. The actor's extreme commitment and quiet strength carry this moving film about one man's unlikely but true Holocaust survival story.

5. Dunkirk

"All we did is survive," laments Harry Styles as a British soldier who braved the beaches of "Dunkirk." "That's enough," replies an old blind man handing out blankets to the haggard soldiers. The men who escaped this death trap in 1940 feel ashamed. No military wins in retreat, but Christopher Nolan's 2017 film captures the moving spirit of living to fight another day.

The evacuation of Dunkirk was a pivotal moment in World War 2. Germany had the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force surrounded and could have crushed them on that beach, but Hitler hesitated. Many have speculated had citizen sailors not rescued these English forces from France, Britain could have fallen to Nazi rule.

The survival of the free world is what's at stake in this imperfect masterpiece. Nolan deploys his signature non-linear editing, hopscotching back and forth in time over the course of multiple days. We're also volleyed between the deadly beaches, a civilian rescue boat, and a brilliant air encounter with Tom Harding as a British flying ace. The cross-cutting is superb but the tricks with time add nothing but confusion to an otherwise superb plot. It's a minor quibble. The British-born auteur has more than earned the right to lean into his temporal fixations in animating the moment his countrymen faced their most dire race against annihilation.

4. Predator

Arnold Schwarzenegger's unforgettable original turn in "Predator" from 1987 rounds out the scariest horror movie ever shot in broad daylight.

A very pumped-up Arnold plays "Dutch," a mercenary hired to rescue some politicians gone missing in the jungles of Guatemala. But Dutch and team find only a trail of mangled bodies and an inhuman force picking them off one-by-one from the trees. Schwarzenegger's final battle with this alien big-game hunter is one of the best action set-pieces of all time. Director John McTiernan ("Die Hard") builds so much fear of this monster in a suspenseful first hour that even for a muscle-bound super-soldier like Dutch, it feels like unfathomable courage to stand and fight.

"Predator" was shot entirely on location in Mexico, so "Lethal Weapon" scribe Shane Black was hired to play one of Dutch's commando comrades, not for his acting chops, but to be available for re-writes in the remote wilderness. Another incredible legend surrounding the film is Jean Claude Van Damme's original casting as the titular monster. Accounts differ as to why he left the film but the funniest is the claim that JCVD wouldn't stop throwing kicks. "You gotta stop kickboxing! Look, the Predator is not a kickboxer," a producer told Van Damme during the shoot, according to visual effects supervisor Joel Hynek, via The Hollywood Reporter.

3. Alien & Aliens

Ridley Scott's "Alien" from 1979 features the most spectacular sci-fi set ever built. The opening scene is just a roving tour of the production team's incredible craft as Scott's camera glides from room to room on this doomed deep-space mining craft.

What Scott is showing us is the physical parameters of the survival game to follow. When the crew accidentally brings an alien aboard that begins picking them off one by one, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) must run, hide, and fight this terrifying extraterrestrial.

James Cameron somehow followed this masterpiece with an equally well-constructed survival-oriented sequel. There are more creatures but the game is the same. The first two "Alien" installments work because of Scott and Cameron's skill at building suspense, but also the terrifying creature design based on the work of artist H.R Giger. "Alien" scribe Dan O'Bannon initially met Giger in Paris while working on "Dune" and immediately the painter offered him opium. O'Bannon asked Giger why he used the drug. Giger replied, "I am afraid of my visions," according to "The Beast Within The Making of Alien." It sounds apocryphal, but one look at these drooling monsters and their eerily oblong heads and you know exactly what he means.

2. The Revenant

Revenant means a return from the dead. "The Revenant" is the story of frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) who is mauled by a bear, buried alive, but somehow survives and seeks vengeance on a fellow trapper, played by Tom Hardy.

"Birdman" director Alejandro González Iñárritu followed up that Oscar-winning effort with this equally kinetic masterpiece. The director again tapped his effervescent cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki ("Gravity") who shot the entire film with only available light, and mostly at the magic hour – that brief window of ambient glow after sunset. Filmmakers like Terrence Malick have always favored this gentle lighting which utilizes all of the earth's atmosphere as one giant bounce board.

The downside is this technique turns the production into a slow grind. Temperatures on location in the Canadian wilderness plummeted to 40 degrees below zero. Iñárritu's movie was over budget and was forced to South America when conditions got too extreme. The director told The Wrap, "There's absolutely nothing that I kept in my pockets — that's all that I've got to give. It almost killed me, too ... maybe having died and been reborn many times during the shooting, I feel extraordinarily proud." This is filmmaking at its most daring, vivid, and beautiful.

1. The Shawshank Redemption

"The Shawshank Redemption" is the ultimate tale of survival of the spirit. Tim Robbins is an inspiration in his best-ever role as that "tall drink of water" Andy Dufresnes. He's been wrongly convicted of killing his wife and sent to the brutal and corrupt Shawshank penitentiary. There, Andy reminds Red (Morgan Freeman) and a small group of fellow convicts that a whole world still exists beyond the prison's demoralizing walls.

Shawshank is based on Stephen King's novella "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption." It's also a story of a daring escape, but that's only possible because Dufresnes risks his life to keep his soul alive. This 1994 film is the best ever adaptation of King's work and scored numerous well-deserved Oscar nods in 1995.