8 Modern Survival Movies That’ll Put You Off Going Outdoors

2) Rescue Dawn

For much of Rescue Dawn, it’s not a case of man coming up against the elements, but a group of POWs struggling to stay alive in a military camp controlled by the Pathet Lao (Laos’ very own Viet Cong).

So it’s a prison movie and a war drama first, before it shifts gears around the halfway mark to a harrowing, occasionally hallucinatory survival tale, with said hallucinations suffered by Christian Bale’s downed US Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, and brought on by the fact that he’s slowly starving to death in the Laotion jungle.

Naturally, as it’s a film starring Christian Bale that requires the lead character to physically wither away, Rescue Dawn sees Bale dropping the pounds to the point where you’re amazed this guy was ever buff enough to play Batman. Living off the land in Southeast Asia, apparently, isn’t a very achievable goal – witness Dengler at the end of the film, emaciated and asking himself whether those earth worms he was fed back in camp were so bad after all.