7) Into The Wild
As in All Is Lost, the threat to the main ‘survivalist’ character in Into the Wild is the fact he doesn’t really know how to survive – at least not in an environment largely untouched by man and that he’s naively assumed won’t be out to kill him. Sean Penn’s fourth film as director is based on Jon Krakauer’s non-fiction book, about the outdoor odyssey of Christopher McCandless, AKA Alexander Supertramp, a promising college graduate who in the early 90s left his privileged life behind to live amongst nature.
For the majority of the film, Into the Wild is like an idealistic young dropout’s dream, telling a tale of rebelling against the system, going off-grid, and starting over as a self-sustaining nomad. And Into the Wild makes it all seem doable – until McCandless mixes up which berries are poisonous and which aren’t, scoffs a mouth-load of the bad stuff, and begins to slowly die, far away from the medical help that could save his life.
Bummer.
6) Life Of Pi
A boy and his tiger head out to sea on a raft built for two, and come to discover an understanding between man and beast in the process – sounds pretty whimsical, right? Wrong.
For all Life of Pi‘s technical wizardry, wondrous cinematography and magical realist tendencies, the underlying truth is that – spoiler alert! – all the cozy, animal-related high seas hijinks are just figments of the lead character’s imagination. In reality, as we find out later, all the fantastical stuff we see in the film is a lie concocted by survivor Pi Patel, with everything following the capsizing of the freighter carrying him and family across the ocean being a cover for the awful truth.
So if it wasn’t bad enough that the young Pi faced the real daily threat of drowning with just a tiny lifeboat for sanctuary, it turns out there was the added element of the young man having to witness his mother being killed by the freighter’s cook, then in turn killing said cook and feasting on his flesh in order to survive.