8 Essential Tips from 'Arctic,' the Best Survival Movie in Years

Your body takes a lot of energy away from maintaining your core temperature in order to melt snow, so avoid it unless you are dehydrating.

• Dig down and then sideways to keep the shelter from collapsing. Snow is good at supporting itself.
• Make the shelter slightly bigger than the space you need for your body so your body has less air to warm
• Be sure to put down a pad, sleeping bag, or another layer of some kind between you and the ground. Laying directly on the snow will sap the heat from your body.

In Arctic, the pilot uses wire and a battery from his plane to generate heat and melt through the ice.

To avoid having to sit exposed while waiting for the fish to bite, make a bell by suspending a portion of the fishing line between two stakes, then string two things onto it that’ll clink together when you've got a fish on—a couple of pots, say, or the blades from trowels.

In an Arctic landscape, you won’t run out of water. But you will run out of food. Getting to sea ice means you’re over water, which means you’re over fish.

Signal for help in a way that can be seen from the sky, even a mirror will do.

In Arctic, the pilot moves snow to render an "SOS" from the underlying black rock—but then has to spend time every day clearing snow that has blown through and obscured the message.

Radios or transponders, especially those powered by a hand crank, are limited in range and direction. So you should regularly rotate transmission locations around your base camp.

Arctic shows us that the pilot has been stranded for weeks by revealing the map on which he tracks his transponder broadcasts: He’s marked off several days of broadcasting at each of several peaks around his plane.

Tells the story of the lone survivor of a plane crash in the far north. Living out of the carcass of his plane, he hones a routine for staying fed and attempting to signal potential rescuers eventually leaving the plane to increase his odds of being rescued.

A lot of research on survival and on frozen landscapes was made for writing the movie and this can be seen in the actions of the character and the challenges he faces.