Robert Redford in âAll Is Lost.â  Having endured a summer of existential threats to the planet â zombie hordes, alien invaders, the usual stuff â moviegoers can now settle in for an autumn of more intimately scaled ordeals. Spectacles of collective apocalypse, the staple of the blockbuster economy, give way to individual stories of adversity and the struggle to survive in limited space. Superheroes step aside in favor of ordinary (albeit highly competent) people equipped with nerve, resourcefulness and impressive but not always reliable technology. Their archenemies are the laws of nature and political economy, abstract forces that take the form of lethal satellite debris, heavy weather and desperate pirates.  From left, Mahat Ali, Tom Hanks and Faysal Ahmed in âCaptain Phillips.â  Survival is the theme of the season, or at least of âCaptain Phillips,â âAll Is Lostâ and âGravity.â These movies have been praised for the way they immerse audiences in the details of heroic feats of endurance. But like most movies, even the most ostentatiously naturalistic, these are also fantasies, tapping into the unacknowledged longings and superstitions of the audience. In savoring these tales of danger, we might wonder just how safe we really are, and how safe we should be.  Somewhere off the eastern coast of Africa, Tom Hanks (in the person of Capt. Richard Phillips, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a mouthful of New England vowels) finds himself trapped on a container ship, taken hostage by a gang of Somali buccaneers. Their leader, a former fisherman named Muse (played by Barkhad Abdi), is in many ways a prisoner in his own right, with fewer options for escape than Phillips, who has the might of global capitalism and the United States Navy at his back.  Not far from where Phillips and Muse are locked in their nerve-shattering standoff â in an adjacent room at the multiplex, and also in another part of the Indian Ocean â Robert Redford fights a lonely battle with the elements. A character without a name or a history, beyond what can be gleaned from his face, the wedding band on his finger and the tasteful dÃ©cor of his expensive yacht, he spends the virtually wordless duration of J. C. Chandorâs âAll Is Lostâ entirely by himself. After his boat is rammed by a wayward shipping container, he sets about patching the hull, setting the storm jib and eventually jumping into an inflatable lifeboat, which he navigates with old-fashioned instruments, charting a course by the stars.  Up above, Sandra Bullock is floating in the zero-gravity terror of âGravity.â Like Mr. Redfordâs character, her NASA mission specialist, Ryan Stone, faces practical challenges against an allegorical backdrop. The sea and the void of outer space are thematic mirrors of each other, symbols of the sublime and the unknown, the inhuman power that at once seduces the human imagination and mocks our speciesâ fantasy of mastery.  At first glance, âAll Is Lostâ and âGravityâ resemble other man-against-the-cosmos parables. Mr. Chandorâs film will put survivors of the standard high school English syllabus in mind of Ernest Hemingwayâs âOld Man and the Sea,â while âGravity,â in its visual grandeur and vivid scariness, solicits the geek ecstasy of Stanley Kubrickâs â2001: A Space Odyssey.â âCaptain Phillipsâ evokes a slightly different but equally venerable tradition, one that goes back to the popular seafaring adventures of the 19th century, which often pitted brave captains against ruthless pirates and mutineers.  But these are also pointedly contemporary stories. The filmmakers make clever use of familiar set pieces â the spacewalk, the circling sharks, the cat-and-mouse game of hostage negotiation â to explore some of the persistent anxieties of 21st-century life in the developed world. They project both common fears and the fantasies that many of us rely on to address those fears, and while none articulates an explicitly political message (âCaptain Phillips,â based on a real 2009 hijacking, comes closest), each is rich with latent political meaning. They are the disaster movies of the moment.  âOurs is indeed an age of extremity,â Susan Sontag concluded in her 1965 essay âThe Imagination of Disaster.â âFor we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.â  The popular art forms Sontag had in mind were science-fiction and horror movies, which gave monstrous shape to widespread fears of nuclear annihilation, environmental catastrophe and soul-killing conformity. They also frequently soothed those fears with images of technical ingenuity and benevolent authority, embodied by the scientists who figured out how to fight space invaders, and the policemen, doctors and soldiers who bravely put their ideas into action.  Sontagâs essay appeared a few years before the rise of the disaster movie as a commercial genre in its own right, but if anything the arrival of âThe Poseidon Adventureâ and its cousins â âThe Towering Infernoâ and the âAirportâ movies, which fed my youthful fear of flying and worship of Charlton Heston â showed the prescience of her analysis. This new genre also shifted the metaphorical terms in which disaster was imagined. The Martians and monsters of the older B movies could be interpreted as non- and anti-human representations of unspeakable political menaces: nuclear weapons, insane ideologies, brutal institutions and so on. But in the wake of the social disruptions of the â60s, the threats were more literal and closer to home. The doomed skyscrapers, ocean liners and jumbo jets were the products of human greed, hubris and corruption. Their destruction brought peril to a collection of people, a movie-star microcosm of the larger society in desperate need of rescue. Bravery, intelligence and self-sacrifice were mobilized (and celebrated) in the name of a commonwealth symbolized by a carefully balanced selection of generations, races, backgrounds and classes.  This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:  An earlier version of this article misstated a word in a passage from Susan Sontagâs essay âThe Imagination of Disaster.â The sentence should read, âIt is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin spectersâ â not âlarge ratiosâ by the popular arts.
Some of this seasonâs films address adversity in solitude â âAll Is Lostâ at sea, âGravityâ in space â or under confinement (âCaptain Phillipsâ).