Movie Characters You Forgot Were In Isolation For Years

In times of widespread illness, unrest, and calamity, society must shut down. Families, friends, and roommates find themselves spending long days indoors, with few to keep them company — or in some cases, entirely alone. It's an intense experience, capable of revealing one's deepest anxieties ... or one's greatest strengths.

Unsurprisingly, it's also a killer storytelling technique. Many of our favorite movie characters have spent years on their own, for a variety of reasons. Some are quarantined due to plague, some are alone by choice, and some are trapped in a remote location because of social breakdown. All of them have had to spend years at a time with no interaction with society. Occasionally, they might encounter a passing stranger, a face on a screen, or an artificial intelligence — but by and large, they're spending years with just themselves for company. These are the characters who spent years in isolation ... and the stories of what that did to them.

The original Oldboy film is the second in legendary director Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy, though it has no real plot connection to the first, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. There's also an American remake of Oldboy directed by Spike Lee. However one encounters it, however, one thing is clear: Oldboy is worth your time.

Oldboy is based on a manga, and has become a neo-noir classic. The main character (Dae-Su in the original, Joe in the remake) is an alcoholic businessman who is kidnapped by an unknown assailant and imprisoned in a tiny room for 15 years. Right before he's managed to dig himself to freedom, he's let go with no explanation.

The rest of the movie follows Dae-Su's quest for revenge, as he attempts to make sense of the time he's missed out on, who has done this to him, and why they have done it at all. Oldboy features a few extremely memorable scenes — a single-shot hallway fight is essentially filmmaking 101, and the film's conclusion is a thrilling, bloody spectacle. It's awful, it's wrenching, and it's entertaining as all get-out.

The ending of 2007's I Am Legend is quite different in the 1954 novel it is based on. In the film, Dr. Neville dies heroically, having sacrificed himself to safeguard the cure to the plague that has transformed humanity into bloodthirsty monsters. In the book, he dies realizing that the world as he knew it is gone, and that he will become a legendary figure to the Earth's new, monstrous denizens, just as vampires were to humanity. Hollywood endings — they come for every story, in the end.

But before those critical climaxes, the story is largely the same. A virus (that began as a miracle cure in the film) wipes out the vast majority of humanity. It mutates a huge number of the survivors into bloodthirsty monsters who are fiercely allergic to the sun. The "lucky" few who are unaffected are hunted by these monsters. One such person is virologist Robert Neville, who ekes out a solitary existence over several years, running experiments and trying to devise a cure for the disease, survive his hunters, and locate any other uninfected humans.

At least he's got his dog, Sam. But save his canine companion, Neville is utterly, tragically, and entirely alone.

You know a movie is swinging for the fences when the response to "Who's in it?" is "Sam Rockwell, and that's about it." That's the case with Moon, Duncan Jones' 2009 sci-fi head trip. Rockwell plays an astronaut named Sam Bell, who is the solitary worker on a moon base for years on end. His only company is an AI system named GERTY, but he's actually bearing his life pretty well ... until his clone shows up.

Moon gets real crazy from there. This is one of those movies you'll probably want to watch again once it's over, just to see what new clues you can pick up.

Moon was made on a tiny budget in just 33 days, and its behind the scenes stories are almost as fascinating as the movie itself. For example, Rockwell has spoken with multiple outlets, like The Guardian, about how he played the different versions of himself to help the audience along — and also waxes poetic about a particularly terrible wig that they considered putting on him. It's a thriller, an elegy, and a poignant look at extreme loneliness.

Watchmen in this case refers to the HBO miniseries, not the comic or film adaptation. Jeremy Irons' absolutely bananas character arc as the smartest man in the world, Adrian Veidt, is original to the series — but it's every bit as bonkers as its source material. Watching the voice of Scar rage around an idyllic countryside, murdering his homegrown servants, was one of 2019's television highlights.

So, backstory. Veidt was once a costumed hero known as Ozymandias. He sees humanity threatened by extinction during the Cold War, and decides to unite the planet against an outside force. He does this by creating a massive "alien" beast, dropping it in New York City, and unleashing a deadly blast of energy that kills millions. The world is, briefly, united, and he stays hidden in his Antarctic laboratory for years afterwards, maintaining the illusion that extra-dimensional beings are threatening the planet.

His true isolation comes after that, when Doctor Manhattan transports him to one of Jupiter's moons to live as he always wanted: Worshiped (by weird clone people) in a perfect little world. As you might expect, he eventually gets bored of it and makes his way back to Earth in time to stop his daughter from stealing Doctor Manhattan's powers. Privacy is not, as Veidt thought, all it's cracked up to be.

No, no. We aren't thinking of The Martian, which is also a movie about Matt Damon getting lost in space. He's only on Mars for about a year and a half. Certainly not pleasant, but it pales in comparison to what his character Dr. Mann goes through in Interstellar.

Dr. Mann is part of the team sent on the Lazarus missions, seeking planets that could sustain human life as the Earth becomes uninhabitable. The world he finds is seen as a prime candidate, and Dr. Mann runs tests to see if his mission would be a success. Unfortunately, the planet he is on is not a good candidate, and he seals himself in cryosleep to wait for death or rescue — whichever comes first.

Three decades later, Dr. Mann is awakened by Joseph Cooper of the spaceship Endurance. It doesn't take him long to turn against his savior, as he attempts to sabotage the crew of the Endurance and steal their ship. He is killed after damaging the Endurance, leaving our heroes with just enough fuel to ... throw themselves into a black hole so they can time travel. We think.