5 Survival Movies That Will Inspire You

2) Touching The Void

And now we travel from an isolated island to the isolated mountains of the Peruvian Andes with Touching the Void, which tells the true story of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, two mountaineers who in 1985 attempted to climb the west face of the Siula Grande Mountains. They weren’t the first to try the 21,000 ft hike, but they were the first to succeed. That’s no spoiler. Their story isn’t about whether or not they make it to the top. It’s about what happens when Simpson breaks his leg on the way back down.

Directed by Kevin MacDonald, Touching the Void, which is part documentary and part re-enactment, chronicles how the two men battle the brutal forces of nature to survive. That they survive is also not a spoiler, as both Yates and Simpson narrate the story. Given we know how things ultimately end, it’s rather surprising that the film manages to be so tense. A lot of that tension comes from the realistically brutal reenactments. The hiking is so believably re-created that you can fool yourself into thinking you’re watching Simpson and Yates, instead of two actors (Brendan Mackey and Nicholas Aaron). Yet even if you’re completely aware you are watching a dramatization, you don’t forget that these horrors happened to real people.

How Simpson in particular survived in the face of physical pain, hypothermia, dehydration and solitude is a testament to the will of the human spirit. Present day Simpson describes having felt a colder, more pragmatic side of himself driving him forward. That part was quite unsympathetic to his pains. “Come on. Keep moving. Keep moving,” it urged him. I am so curious if we all have a similar basic programming hard-wired into us. In the face of death, will it turn on? Or was Simpson’s resolve a result of his personality type? When facing a slow death to exposure or a slow painful trek across glaciers and crevasses, what does the average person choose? How much is life worth?