20 Best Survival Movies Of All Time

Christian Bale has had a long and varied career, full of great performances and fantastic films, but Rescue Dawn still seems like one of his most underrated and under-seen flicks. It also sports a brilliant performance from Steve Zahn, with a plot as simple and as small as the film is thick with anxiety.

The film follows Dieter Dengler, a fighter pilot shot down during the Vietnam War who is found and captured by the Pathet Lao (a group of communist Vietnamese soldiers). He is offered freedom if he signs a document that decries America, but he refuses and plots a daring escape through the twisting and dangerous jungle with his fellow prisoners.

Directed by Werner Herzog, the film shifts between scenes of action and quiet character moments with ease, and the physical conditions of the protagonists (Bale and Zahn leading them) is horrifying and bleak. They are malnourished, beaten and cold, but they push on in hope of finding freedom.

Like all the films on this list, Rescue Dawn is held up by great acting, but mostly by a large amount of strong and palpable tension. Despite the state of their bodies and their minds, the prisoners refused to stop trying, and that's exactly how a good pure-survival flick should be.