[Spoilers herein.]

This weekend, Alfonso Cuarón's lost-in-space thriller Gravity opens in theaters, featuring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock playing astronauts who get marooned in zero gravity after their space station is hit by Russian satellite debris. The struggle to get out of a rather major pinch like this made us think about other survival-type films in which the protagonists go to extreme lengths to save themselves. Here are a few that employ daring survival tactics, from sawing one's arm off to stabbing a grizzly bear.

Children of Men (2006)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Another Alfonso Cuarón film, this one portrays a futuristic world where the human race is infertile. Clive Owen (Theo) discovers a woman (Kee) is pregnant and agrees to escort her through a war-torn and military-run Britain so she can reach a ship where she and her baby will be taken care of. Close to the end of the movie, Kee gets captured and is held by a militant group in an apartment. Theo arrives and is able to escape with her, because everyone is so in awe of the first baby born in years, they cease fighting long enough for Theo to run off with Kee and for her to perpetuate life.

Extremeness of Survival: When everybody's out to kill you and you outsmart them with your intelligence and Christ-like demeanor, it speaks louder than blowing your enemies up with an M60.

White Water Summer (1987)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Kevin Bacon plays a dick of a camp leader (Vic) and bullies the wimpy Sean Astin (Alan) while leading three other teens on a six-week-long summer camping trip (replete with bad '80s music). Near the end of the adventure, Vic falls from a 20-foot drop and breaks his leg. Suddenly, Alan steps up and rescues him using the survival skills he learned: He rigs a pulley system using rappelling ropes and yanks Vic out of the ditch. It's a race to get Vic to the doctor, and with the others fleeing to find help, it's up to Alan to place the injured Vic in a canoe and traverse through perilous rapids to safety. It's a little crazy considering this kid was terrified to even cross a bridge but then he butched up and saved the day.

Extremeness of Survival: Relatively low. The only person who couldn't save Kevin Bacon was Kevin Bacon — it would've been cooler if he would've pulled a Touching the Void and saved himself instead of having a nerdy, unlikable kid do his bidding.

28 Days Later (2002)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

There's an awesome nine-minute sequence in which soldiers hold two women hostage at a house, ready to rape them. Cillian Murphy (Jim) unleashes a zombified soldier into the house, who massacres a lot of the other soldiers. Jim then sneaks into the house and stabs one solider with a machine gun, and pokes another's eyes out. Once most of the soldiers are dead, Jim escapes with the girls. It's a pretty graphic sequence and shows the lengths some people go to survive a zombie apocalypse.

Extremeness of Survival: Pretty remarkable. As we've all learned, zombies aren't anything to shake a stick at, especially these fast-running ones.

Buried (2010)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

The plot is simple: Ryan Reynolds gets buried in a coffin with only a pen, matches, flask, flashlight, knife, glowsticks, and a cell phone to use; he has a short time to call the right people and direct them to his whereabouts. In one scene, his kidnapper calls him and tells him to cut off his finger and send him a video of it, and if he doesn't, the kidnapper will murder his family. Without much choice, Reynolds saws off his finger. Inevitably, none of his survival tactics do him any good as, well, let's just say he's buried for good. But at least his family's alive!

Extremeness of Survival: Spoiler: Ryan Reynolds doesn't survive, despite being in the Army. But if he would've survived that whole mess, he would've been a hero.

127 Hours (2010)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Nothing could be more unsettling and courageous than severing your own arm to literally get out between a rock and a hard place. James Franco (Aron Ralston) hikes in Utah and falls through a shaft, getting his arm wedged in between a boulder and the canyon's wall. With his limited supplies running out, he recognizes he must free his arm or else he will die. When trying to chip away at the boulder doesn't work, he uses a dull knife and cuts the trapped part of his arm off. He escapes and lives to write a book about it.

Extremeness of Survival: Epic. Cutting off your arm? Some of us can barely stand a minor paper cut.

Alive (1993)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

As the maxim goes, "If you can't beat them, eat them." The film became notorious for its scene in which the cast of plane survivors were forced to eat their dead companions. Crazier, it's based on a true story of a rugby team who crashed into the Andes mountains on their way to Chile. In contemplating the cannibalism, one character says, "It's like communion: From their death we live." It looks like eating human flesh worked — 16 survivors were helicoptered out of the mountains, and all they needed was a little help from their friends.

Extremeness of Survival: Impressive. Eating bugs and drinking your own urine to survive is one thing; eating your human friends is another. Explain that to a vegetarian.

Deliverance (1972)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Everything that could go wrong goes wrong on a male-bonding camping trip. First, Ned Beatty gets raped by a townie, and when one of the inbred brothers is about to hurt Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds shoots a bow and arrow at him and kills him. Later on while canoeing down the river, Ronny Cox gets shot and killed, which propels the canoes into rocks breaking Burt Reynolds's leg. Jon Voight hunts down the man he thinks killed Cox and squares off against him, murdering him with a bow and arrow right before the man can shoot him. The three survivors all make it back to town but are asked never to return, which is quite all right by them.

Extremeness of Survival: Average. There's a reason "squeal like a pig" and hillbillies are synonymous with this movie: Inbreds are frightening and difficult to defeat, but bravo to the three men who escaped them.

Touching the Void (2003)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates reach the summit of Siula Grande in the Andes only to run into trouble. Simpson falls and breaks his leg, and Yates uses a rope and tries to lower him off the mountain. When Simpson falls again and a blizzard impairs Yates's vision, Yates assumes Simpson is dead and cuts the rope. But Simpson is very much alive and falls through a crevasse. He manages to crawl out of the crevasse and drag himself across a glacier until he makes it back to base camp, where he finds Yates. A retelling of a true story, the film uses dramatization and interviews with the real-life explorers to explain this extraordinary tale of survival against all odds. (Available streaming on Netflix.)

Extremeness of Survival: Spectacular. With the incidents in Alive and other mountain survival stories on this list, why does anyone even go near a mountain?

Shackleton (2002)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Kenneth Branagh plays the real-life explorer Ernest Shackleton, who, through a 800-mile journey, saves his shipwrecked men. In 1914, Shackleton set out to become the first person to reach Antarctica from sea to sea. Because it's Antarctica, ice mangles the ship and sinks it, but the men escape unscathed. Using a lifeboat, Shackleton and the crew attempt to reach nearby islands, covering hundreds of miles through ocean and mountains. Shackleton finally lands at a whaling station and saves himself and all of his men.

Extremeness of Survival: Off the charts. Shackleton's story of endurance makes everybody else on this list look like wimps.

Cast Away (2000)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Ingrained in pop-culture history, this film is best-known for the island-stranded Tom Hanks befriending a volleyball named Wilson. Once enough detritus washes ashore, Tom Hanks builds his own raft and paddles away with Wilson at the helm. They survive tumultuous waves, weather, and the raft almost being destroyed, and end up staying adrift for a long period of time. When all seems lost, a cargo ship shows up and rescues Hanks. Unfortunately, Wilson isn't met with the same fate.

Extremeness of Survival: Meh. Staying alive on a stranded island for four years isn't an easy feat, but there's always a 50/50 chance of getting rescued. And Tom Hanks escaped with all his limbs and most of his sanity intact.

The Grey (2011)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

We all know what a badass Liam Neeson is, but in The Grey he's so badass he stabs a wolf and may or may not survive. Yet another story centered on a plane crash, in which a group of men get stranded near a wolf den in Alaska during wintertime and quickly realize they are being hunted by the pack. One by one, the lupines kill the men, but they vow to fight back as best they can. In addition to the wolves chasing them, the men must deal with the other hazardous elements: blizzards, falling off a bridge, drowning in a river. As the lone survivor, Liam Neeson faces off against the alpha wolf. He grips a knife and glass bottles, but before we know if beast or man wins, the screen goes black. (Available streaming on Netflix.)

Extremeness of Survival: Liam Neeson's job in the film is to kill wolves, so it was probably easy for him to escape the alpha's wrath. So in this situation, probably not as extreme as it would've been for an amateur wolf fighter.

The Road (2009)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

The film is based on the novel about an unnamed father and son trying to survive in a stark post-apocalyptic world. There are no zombies here, but instead bands of marauders who try to hurt the father and son. The duo reach a farmhouse and find a cadre of emaciated prisoners in the basement; they realize the inhabitants of the house are eating them. When the father spots the owners coming home and the threat of being caught is imminent, he sticks a gun at his son, ready to pull the trigger. But luckily, the father and son accidentally left the door to the basement unlocked, which allows the cannibals to be distracted long enough for the family to escape for the moment. (Available streaming on Netflix.)

Extremeness of Survival: Making out of a Mad Max-like world unscathed is highly unlikely, especially when everybody you come in contact with wants to sabotage you. Because survival is a constant challenge in this world, do you ever really survive?

The Impossible (2012)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

While vacationing in Thailand, a husband, wife, and their three sons get swept away in the deadly 2004 tsunami. Naomi Watts (Maria) and her son Lucas hold on for dear life as they soar through the muddy waters, pass SUVs, and hang on to whatever detritus they can. Eventually both are injured, especially Maria who suffers a severe broken leg and chest wound. Thai villagers find them and take them to a local hospital where at first Maria is wrongly pronounced dead. By some miracle, the rest of the family finds each other outside of the hospital and all of them survive.

Extremeness of Survival: Pure luck. With all of the water and debris, Maria and her family could've easily drowned. Guess God must really like them.

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

A pre-cursor to Titanic but much more kitschy, in which a group of people are taking a New Year's cruise on the luxury liner SS Poseidon when an earthquake causes a tsunami to erupt. A few people survive the calamity and escape to safety, but not before the survivors dodge explosions, flooding, and Shelley Winters suffering a heart attack. Ernest Borgnine and Gene Hackman (Reverend Scott) lead the passengers through various rooms in the ship, including the propeller room where a pipe ruptures and releases steam, encumbering their escape. The Reverend turns off the valve and sacrifices himself, as Borgnine and the remaining passengers reach the propeller room door and are saved.

Extremeness of Survival: Considering not many people survived the Titanic, and considering passengers of the Titanic had the option to jump off the ship instead of enduring Shelley Winters and Ernest Borgnine, we'd say this is a fairly extreme survival scenario.

MOST IMPRESSIVE SURVIVAL: The Edge (1997)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Not only does the viewer learn how to make fire from ice and get a glimpse of a crying-like-a-bitch Alec Baldwin (Bob), they also get to see Sir Anthony Hopkins (Charles) kill a 1,500-pound grizzly bear. Stranded after a plane crash, Charles, Bob, and another guy must figure a way out of their predicament while being stalked by Bart the Bear. Early on, the bear feasts on the third and disposable member, but the bear's still bloodthirsty. He eventually catches up with the guys but they have prepared a booby trap for him. When the bear thwarts the trap and runs after them, it corners Charles in a creek where Charles jams a spear into a log and lets the bear impale itself. Man 1, nature 0.

Extremeness of Survival: Incredible. Anthony Hopkins stabbing a bear to death makes Hannibal Lecter look like Jack Donaghy. Though cutting off your arm is pretty impressive, this one takes it.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io