Throughout film history, men’s egos have crumbled in the hands of Mother Nature. Whether it’s Mr Jon Voight attempting to slither into the mind of a snake only to become a lump in its belly in Anaconda (1997) or Mr George Clooney steering his ship into the 90-degree climb of a tsunami in The Perfect Storm (2000), there’s no filmic face-palm like man’s fight with nature. In The Call Of The Wild (in cinemas now), a misanthrope and nature prat played by Mr Harrison Ford takes his dog to an unexplored region of the Yukon mountains – and gets really, really cold and wet. Here are five other films that explore man vs nature.

In Mr William Friedkin’s 1977 sleeper hit, four truck drivers must transport highly explosive nitroglycerin through treacherous forest terrain in the Dominican Republic. Mr Roy Scheider leads the way, negotiating mercurial weather conditions and his colleagues’ mounting animosity. The shoot was plagued with trouble. After the Exorcist director faced difficulties filming in a village because of his reputation for envelope-pushing, he then spent several months filming the movie’s iconic 12-minute bridge-crossing scene. The final results were worth it. Sorcerer is The Wizard Of Oz meets Deliverance, with a sprinkling of ego death.

If Sorcerer was one of the rainiest films of the 1970s, Wake In Fright was probably the hottest. Director Mr Ted Kotcheff blasted enough dust and heat at his lead star Mr Gary Bond to drive anyone to the edge, and the film’s suffocating aesthetic and psychedelic study of heteronormativity in crisis remains a high watermark of the Australian New Wave movement. Mr Bond plays a school teacher lost in a parochial and mean-spirited town in southeast Australia. There, he meets local drunk Mr Donald Pleasence and the pair go on a darkly sensual trip to the Outback.

In The Edge (1997), a Hollywood first: Mr Alec Baldwin plays a man whose self-importance seems to eclipse a bear’s. When Mr Baldwin’s eminent photographer Bob Green becomes stranded in the Alaskan wilderness with love rival and billionaire Charles Morse (Sir Anthony Hopkins), the pair attract the attention of said bear, prompting them to run, hide, skin and shout their way to survival before, you guessed it, turning their tent poles on each other. “I’m gonna kill the motherf***er!” screams Mr Baldwin of the fanged 300kg killing machine. But, the film screeches at you as it reaches its climax, isn’t man’s greatest natural foe himself? Ooooh!

Telling the story of director Mr Werner Herzog’s explosive friendship with his closest friend and collaborator Mr Klaus Kinski, this 1999 feature-length documentary plays out on the set of Mr Herzog’s ambitious movie (and plagued production) Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (1972). The volatility of the Peruvian jungle, where the film was shot, was a metaphor for leading man Mr Kinski’s wavering mental state (the actor even pulls a gun on someone on set). “Together, we were like critical masses,” Mr Herzog says of the friendship. It’s like bro love playing out in a Mr Hieronymous Bosch painting.

Plane crash, cannibalism, rugby lads. Alive tells the true story of a Uruguayan rugby team whose aircraft crashes in the Andes and who are forced to do anything they can to survive. And by anything, we mean make a meal out of each other’s corpses. Narrated by Mr John Malkovich and starring a fresh-out-of-frat-house Mr Ethan Hawke, the film shocked the world when it landed in 1993, not least for its relatively muted depictions of man-on-man flesh-eating.