20 best movies like Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984)

A man-cub named Mowgli fostered by wolves. After a threat from the tiger Shere Khan, Mowgli is forced to flee the jungle, by which he embarks on a journey of self discovery with the help of the panther, Bagheera and the free-spirited bear, Baloo.

Dramatic retelling of the fateful last voyage of the Nantucket whaleship Essex. When the Essex is attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in November 1820, her crew take to three fragile whalers. Alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the men must decide whether to head for the nearest islands - a thousand miles downwind to the west - or set out on an epic journey of almost three thousand miles to reach the South American mainland. Fear of cannibals forces them to choose South America. Almost three months later, the first whaler is rescued by another whaleship. Only three men are still alive. A week later the captain's whaler is also rescued, with just two men aboard. The third whaler is never found. This is a story of human endurance and what men in extremis will do to survive.

Tarzan, having acclimated to life in London, is called back to his former home in the jungle to investigate the activities at a mining encampment.

The fates of horses, and the people who own and command them, are revealed as Black Beauty narrates the circle of his life.

Thrown together under incredible circumstances, two strangers must discover courage and strength when they begin a journey across the treacherous African desert! Equipped only with their wits and the expertise of a native bushman who befriends them, they are determined to triumph over impossible odds and reach their destination. But along the way, the trio face a primitive desert wilderness.

Interstellar chronicles the adventures of a group of explorers who make use of a newly discovered wormhole to surpass the limitations on human space travel and conquer the vast distances involved in an interstellar voyage.

Sheena's white parents are killed while on Safari. She is raised by the mystical witch woman of an African tribe. When her foster mother is framed for the murder of a political leader, Sheena and a newsman, Vic Casey are forced to flee while pursued by the mercenaries hired by the real killer, who hopes to assume power. Sheena's ability to talk to the animals and knowledge of jungle lore give them a chance against the high tech weapons of the mercenaries.

A mysterious guide escorts an enthusiastic adventurer and his friend into the Amazon jungle, but their journey turns into a terrifying ordeal as the darkest elements of human nature and the deadliest threats of the wild force them to fight for survival.

Britain, A.D. 117. Quintus Dias, the sole survivor of a Pictish raid on a Roman frontier fort, marches north with General Virilus' legendary Ninth Legion, under orders to wipe the Picts from the face of the Earth and destroy their leader, Gorlacon.

A young woman, Jill Young, grew up on her father's ranch in Africa, raising a large gorilla named Joe from an infant. Years later, she brings him to Hollywood to become a star.

A true-life drama in the 1920s, centering on British explorer Col. Percy Fawcett, who discovered evidence of a previously unknown, advanced civilazation in the Amazon and disappeared whilst searching for it.

During a solo voyage in the Indian Ocean, a veteran mariner awakes to find his vessel taking on water after a collision with a stray shipping container. With his radio and navigation equipment disabled, he sails unknowingly into a violent storm and barely escapes with his life. With any luck, the ocean currents may carry him into a shipping lane -- but, with supplies dwindling and the sharks circling, the sailor is forced to face his own mortality.

Sir Robert Beaumont is behind schedule on a railroad in Africa. Enlisting noted engineer John Henry Patterson to right the ship, Beaumont expects results. Everything seems great until the crew discovers the mutilated corpse of the project's foreman, seemingly killed by a lion. After several more attacks, Patterson calls in famed hunter Charles Remington, who has finally met his match in the bloodthirsty lions.

Teenage boys discover discipline and camaraderie on an ill-fated sailing voyage.

The familiar story of Lieutenant Bligh, whose cruelty leads to a mutiny on his ship. This version follows both the efforts of Fletcher Christian to get his men beyond the reach of British retribution, and the epic voyage of Lieutenant Bligh to get his loyalists safely to East Timor in a tiny lifeboat.

Under the pretense of having a picnic, a geologist takes his teenage daughter and 6-year-old son into the Australian outback and attempts to shoot them. When he fails, he turns the gun on himself, and the two city-bred children must contend with harsh wilderness alone. They are saved by a chance encounter with an Aborigine boy who shows them how to survive, and in the process underscores the disharmony between nature and modern life.

A teenager finds himself transported to an island where he must help protect a group of orphans with special powers from creatures intent on destroying them.

Set during the period of growing influence of the Indian independence movement in the British Raj, the story begins with the arrival in India of a British woman, Miss Adela Quested, who is joining her fiancé, a city magistrate named Ronny Heaslop. She and Ronny's mother, Mrs. Moore, befriend an Indian doctor, Aziz H. Ahmed.

After young Kirra leaves her Australian home to summer with her grandfather in South Africa, she soon discovers a baby orca stranded in the lagoon near her grandfather’s rundown seaside amusement park. She names the lonely whale Willy--and embarks on a great quest to lead the little guy back to his anxious pod.

Peter Weir's follow-up to Master & Commander (2003) is the stark & brilliant The Way Back, which takes on the theme of man's struggle for freedom. At the dawn of WWII, several men escape from a Russian gulag. The film details their perilous & uncertain journey to freedom, as they cross deserts, mountains, & several nations.

A drama based on the experiences of Agu, a child soldier fighting in the civil war of an unnamed African country. Follows the journey of a young boy, Agu, who is forced to join a group of soldiers in a fictional West African country. While Agu fears his commander and many of the men around him, his fledgling childhood has been brutally shattered by the war raging through his country, and he is at first torn between conflicting revulsion and fascination Depicts the mechanics of war and does not shy away from explicit, visceral detail, and paints a complex, difficult picture of Agu as a child soldier.

Allie Fox, an American inventor exhausted by the perceived danger and degradation of modern society, decides to escape with his wife and children to Belize. In the jungle, he tries with mad determination to create a utopian community with disastrous results.

In this sequel to the 1980 classic, two children are stranded on a beautiful island in the South Pacific. With no adults to guide them, the two make a simple life together and eventually become tanned teenagers in love.

Brennan is Liverpool's number one fan, able to recite facts ad infinitum about the club and at a public school in the south of England since his father Gareth is emotionally unable to care for him following the death of Will's mother. Gareth appears one day out of the blue with tickets for Liverpool's trip to the 2005 Champions League Final in Istanbul.

A young man leaves Ireland with his landlord's daughter after some trouble with her father, and they dream of owning land at the big giveaway in Oklahoma ca. 1893. When they get to the new land, they find jobs and begin saving money. The man becomes a local barehands boxer, and rides in glory until he is beaten, then his employers steal all the couple's money and they must fight off starvation in the winter, and try to keep their dream of owning land alive. Meanwhile, the woman's parents find out where she has gone and have come to America to find her and take her back.

As the British and French soldiers battle for control of the American colonies in the 18th century, the settlers and native Americans are forced to take sides. Cora and her sister Alice unwittingly walk into trouble but are reluctantly saved by Hawkeye, an orphaned settler adopted by the last of the Mohicans.

Beirut, 1982: a young Palestinian refugee and an Israeli fighter pilot form a tentative bond in their attempt to make their way across war-torn Lebanon back to their home.

The inspiring true story of Seretse Khama, the King of Bechuanaland (modern Botswana), and Ruth Williams, the London office worker he married in 1948 in the face of fierce opposition from their families and the British and South African governments. Seretse and Ruth defied family, Apartheid and empire - their love triumphed over every obstacle flung in their path and in so doing they transformed their nation and inspired the world.

Crusoe is a television adventure drama based loosely on the novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. The series' 13 episodes aired on NBC during the first half of the 2008–2009 television season. It follows the adventures of Robinson Crusoe: a man who has been shipwrecked on an island for six years and is desperate to return home to his wife and children. His lone companion is Friday, a native whom Crusoe rescued and taught English.

A man who suffers visions of an apocalyptic deluge takes measures to protect his family from the coming flood.

When soldier Robin happens upon the dying Robert of Loxley, he promises to return the man's sword to his family in Nottingham. There, he assumes Robert's identity; romances his widow, Marion; and draws the ire of the town's sheriff and King John's henchman, Godfrey.

In 1944, in South Pacific, the castaway Marine Corporal Allison drifts in a raft to the Tuasiva Island, where he meets Sister Angela. She tells him that she is the only person in the island and was left behind by the runaway boat to Fiji Island while seeking the local priest. Stranded in the island, but with water, fish and fruits, their paradisiacal life ends when the Japanese arrive to build a base, forcing Allison and the nun to hide in a cave. The crude marine provides the necessary supply for their survival and falls in love for the nun.

Hector is a quirky psychiatrist who has become increasingly tired of his humdrum life. As he tells his girlfriend, Clara, he feels like a fraud: he hasn’t really tasted life, and yet he’s offering advice to patients who are just not getting any happier. So Hector decides to break out of his deluded and routine driven life. Armed with buckets of courage and child-like curiosity, he embarks on a global quest in hopes of uncovering the elusive secret formula for true happiness. And so begins a larger than life adventure with riotously funny results.

Based on a true story, the film is set in the summer of 1984 – when Margaret Thatcher is in power and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is on strike. At the Gay Pride March in London, a group of gay and lesbian activists decides to raise money to support the families of the striking miners. But there is a problem - the union seems embarrassed to receive their support. However the activists are not deterred. They decide to ignore the union and go direct to the miners. They identify a mining village of Onllwyn, in the Dulais Valley in Wales, and later set off in a mini bus to make their donation in person. And so begins the extraordinary story of two seemingly alien communities who form a surprising and ultimately triumphant partnership.

The story of an Indian boy named Pi, a zookeeper's son who finds himself in the company of a hyena, zebra, orangutan, and a Bengal tiger after a shipwreck sets them adrift in the Pacific Ocean.

Victor Marswell runs a big game trapping company in Kenya. Eloise Kelly is ditched there, and an immediate attraction happens between them. Then Mr. and Mrs. Nordley show up for their gorilla documenting safari. Mrs. Nordley is not infatuated with her husband any more, and takes a liking to Marswell. The two men and two women have some difficulty arranging these emotions to their mutual satisfaction, but eventually succeed.

A rogue submarine captain pulls together a misfit crew to go after a sunken treasure rumored to be lost in the depths of the Black Sea. As greed and desperation take control on-board their claustrophobic vessel, the increasing uncertainty of the mission causes the men to turn on each other to fight for their own survival.

In the winter of 1820, the New England whaling ship Essex was assaulted by something no one could believe: a whale of mammoth size and will, and an almost human sense of vengeance. The real-life maritime disaster would inspire Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.  But that told only half the story.  “Heart of the Sea” reveals the encounter’s harrowing aftermath, as the ship’s surviving crew is pushed to their limits and forced to do the unthinkable to stay alive.  Braving storms, starvation, panic and despair, the men will call into question their deepest beliefs, from the value of their lives to the morality of their trade, as their captain searches for direction on the open sea and his first mate still seeks to bring the great whale down.

Robinson Crusoe flees Britain on a ship after killing his friend over the love of Mary. A fierce ocean storm wrecks his ship and leaves him stranded by himself on an uncharted island. Left to fend for himself, Crusoe seeks out a tentative survival on the island, until he meets Friday, a tribesman whom he saves from being sacrificed. Initially, Crusoe is thrilled to finally have a friend, but he has to defend himself against the tribe who uses the island to sacrifice tribesman to their gods. During time their relationship changes from master-slave to a mutual respected friendship despite their difference in culture and religion.

As a child living in Africa, Jill Young saw her mother killed while protecting wild gorillas from poachers led by Andrei Strasser. Now an adult, Jill cares for an orphaned gorilla named Joe -- who, due to a genetic anomaly, is 15 feet tall. When Gregg O'Hara arrives from California and sees the animal, he convinces Jill that Joe would be safest at his wildlife refuge. But Strasser follows them to the U.S., intent on capturing Joe for himself.

A prehistoric epic that follows a young mammoth hunter's journey through uncharted territory to secure the future of his tribe.

An ex-mercenary turned smuggler. A Mende fisherman. Amid the explosive civil war overtaking 1999 Sierra Leone, these men join for two desperate missions: recovering a rare pink diamond of immense value and rescuing the fisherman's son conscripted as a child soldier into the brutal rebel forces ripping a swath of torture and bloodshed countrywide.

Based on Anne Holm's acclaimed young adult novel North to Freedom, I Am David chronicles the struggles of a 12-year-old boy who manages to flee a Communist concentration camp on his own -- through sheer will and determination. All he has in his possession is a loaf of bread, a letter to deliver to someone in Denmark and a compass to help get him there.

Twenty-something Richard travels to Thailand and finds himself in possession of a strange map. Rumours state that it leads to a solitary beach paradise, a tropical bliss - excited and intrigued, he sets out to find it.

The true story of mountain climber Aron Ralston's remarkable adventure to save himself after a fallen boulder crashes on his arm and traps him in an isolated canyon in Utah.

A surreal adaptation of Sir Thomas Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur", chronicling Arthur Pendragon's conception, his rise to the throne, the search by his Knights of the Round Table for the Holy Grail, and ultimately his death.

During World War One an English adventurer, an American elephant poacher and the latter's attractive young daughter, set out to destroy a German battle-cruiser which is awaiting repairs in an inlet just off Zanzibar. The story is based on a novel by Wilbur Smith, which in turn is very loosely based on events involving the light cruiser SMS Königsberg, which was sunk after taking refuge in Rufigi delta in 1915.

A cargo aircraft crashes in a sandstorm in the Sahara with less than a dozen men on board. One of the passengers is an airplane designer who comes up with the idea of ripping off the undamaged wing and using it as the basis for a replacement aircraft they will build to escape before their food and water run out.

When an archaeological expedition opens an ancient Egyptian tomb, the unimaginable evil of a cursed pharaoh is unleashed.

An overview of the making of Mel Gibson's 'Apocalypto'.