The Lost Bus is the exhilarating new survival thriller starring Matthew McConaughey, now available on Apple TV+. Oscar-winner McConaughey stars as Kevin McKay, an elementary school bus driver in the community of Paradise, California, who has to transport students to safety as their town becomes consumed by a wildfire.
The movie is a pulse-pounding ride that shows the devastating nature of wildfires. However, it is made even more intense because it is based on a true story revolving around the 2018 Camp Fire, which became the deadliest wildfire in California’s history. As such, The Lost Bus joins an incredible collection of intense survival movies based on real events.
Deepwater Horizon (2016)
The Lost Bus highlights how easily dry conditions and strong winds can cause devastation during wildfires, but it also touches on the human elements of corporations holding responsibilities for these disasters. This is very much highlighted in the survival thriller Deepwater Horizon, which details the explosion and oil spill that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
While there were enormous environmental impacts due to the disaster, Deepwater Horizon focuses on the oil rig workers fighting to escape the burning structure in the middle of the ocean. Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, and Gina Rodriguez fill out in ensemble, and the movie depicts how greed and indifference led to the loss of many lives.
Thirteen Lives (2022)
Survival stories can often be harrowing tales of people facing death, but movies like The Lost Bus also show that the genre can have triumphant stories of heroism as well. Thirteen Lives is another movie of this kind, as it tells the incredible and seemingly impossible rescue mission to save the lives of the young members of a soccer team who became trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018.
The movie does an amazing job of showing the difficulty of the rescue plan, with the likes of Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen playing the rescue divers tasked with carrying it out. There is a ticking clock aspect to the story as the waters rise and the children face imminent danger, making for a gripping experience from beginning to end.
Society of the Snow (2023)
Some real-life disasters have become so fascinating and compelling to the world that they have been told on film multiple times. Alive was a 1993 movie that tackled the story of the 1972 Uruguayan plane crash that stranded a football team and several other passengers in the Andes Mountains for 72 days.
However, the 2023 Oscar-winning Netflix movie Society of the Snow is an even more visceral telling of the story, depicting the horrific crash as well as the brutal days that followed, in which many of the initial survivors lost their lives due to the harsh elements. It is a devastating story, yet another incredible tale of human resilience.
The Impossible (2012)
Long before Tom Holland became Spider-Man, he had a breakout role in the powerful survival story, The Impossible. Holland stars alongside Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor as a family vacationing in Thailand in 2004 when the region is struck by a devastating tsunami.
The fact that the movie follows a single family at the center of the disaster gives it even greater emotional stakes. Several of the family members are separated in the chaos and fight to not only survive but also make their way back to each other.
Apollo 13 (1995)
While many survival movies based on true stories tackle natural disasters on Earth, Apollo 13 had the opportunity to tell the story of one of the most famous survival stories in space. Tom Hanks leads the cast of Ron Howard’s gripping thriller detailing the NASA mission to the moon in 1970 that suffered several catastrophic problems that put the lives of three astronauts in peril.
Like many of these survival stories, the fact that we know how the story ends does nothing to take away from the intensity of the movie. It is also a stirring story of how the people on the ground worked tirelessly to save their astronauts and the clever plans they constructed.
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