No One Gets Left Behind / Films — Live-Action

• Invoked and then defied in Air Force One - the titular plane is going down too quickly for the rescue mission to save everyone, so the last para-rescue trooper says his orders are to take President Marshall off now. Marshall furiously demands that they try, but is brought up short by Major Caldwell.
  Marshall: No! We're all going.
  Rescue Trooper: That's impossible, sir! I have to take you!
  Caldwell: Mr. President, it's time to get you off this plane! Go, sir, go!
• In Aliens, after the Colonial Marines learn that some of the ones left behind in the escape are still alive, Vasquez says "Then we go back in there and get them. We don't leave our people behind." They end up not trying to do so after Ripley points out "You can't help them! You can't. Right now they're being cocooned just like the others."
• Averted in the 1982 Australian/Taiwanese movie Attack Force Z. A member of a World War II commando force is wounded while landing on a Japanese-occupied island. After exchanging overly casual banter and a cigarette the commander shoots him, so he won't be captured and give away the mission under torture.
• The firefighters in Backdraft have this as part of their code of honor. "You go, we go."
• This is basically the plot of Black Hawk Down (the film's tagline is downright "Leave no man behind"), based on the Battle of Mogadishu. In the analysis in the book, the commanding general's decision to not leave a man (or body) behind is examined, with the idea that the general, not wanting to leave a body for the Somalis to desecrate, ended up giving them an overwhelming opportunity to inflict casualties on the American forces, and also gave them a prisoner, resulting in a significantly worse overall outcome than if he had just left the bodies behind.
• Subversion: In Canadian Bacon, the Omega Force sent to locate the protagonist is running along the Canadian wilderness when one of them falls down and clutches his foot. Another one approaches, and the guy on the ground says "It's just my toe." Boom.
• Most of the plot of Cloverfield, with Rob and companions trying to save Beth as the monster flattens Manhattan. Later lampooned when Hud, probably the least intelligent of a rather dim group, goes back to retrieve the camera from the helicopter wreckage, only to get bitten in half by the monster.
• The main character of Con Air follows this as a former Ranger. He does so as a combination of Rambo and Jesus.
• Subverted in Courage Under Fire, where a character is first shown yelling at a trainee never to leave his wounded comrades behind. It later turns out that he'd done just that to his wounded commanding officer after she'd threatened to court-martial him.
• The Dogs of War. In the Action Prologue, the mercenaries are escaping a Central American country on the last plane out. They insist on bringing everyone, even after it's pointed out that one of the mercenaries is dead.
  Official: This man's dead! Get him out!
  (mercenary removes the pin from a grenade and wraps the dead man's fingers around it.)
  Mercenary: He's live, you pimp!
  (fingers loosen slightly on grenade — official backs off)
  Mercenary commander: Everybody who comes with me, goes home.
• The Finest Hours: Bernie refuses to head pack to port until everyone is off the Pendleton.
• The Forgotten Battle: One of the protagonists, William, is the copilot of a military glider that is brought down behind enemy lines, with the pilot badly wounded. This obliges the surviving troops from the glider to carry him as they attempt to evade enemy forces through difficult marshy terrain. William is especially insistent that the pilot not be left behind, though some of the others are less committed.
• In Forrest Gump, Gump earns the Medal of Honor for rescuing his fellow soldiers in Vietnam. At times, Lieutenant Dan wishes that he had lost his life instead of his lower legs. Ironically, the one soldier that Forrest failed to save the life of was the one he originally went back to help. He kept stumbling on other wounded comrades and brought every one of them back because he felt he "couldn't just leave them there, frightened and hurt."
• In Full Metal Jacket the VC sniper uses their knowledge of this to sucker the U.S. troops to try to rescue their wounded comrades.
• The Guns of Navarone. Both played straight and Subverted with Major Franklin: first Captain Mallory refuses to leave him behind, then does leave him behind with the Germans after feeding him false information about the nature of their mission in the hope the Germans will use Truth Serums to get it out of him.
• This is Sam's attitude in High Plains Invaders. He is insistent that all of the survivors get of town alive. When Rose suggests that they might be able to crawl out past the Bugs, Sam rejects it because Serena's broken leg means that she cannot crawl.
• Averted in It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958). Twice a member of the crew has to be left behind while the others escape the Nigh-Invulnerable monster.
  • Gino is found half-dead in an air vent, but the monster is also there and attacks his would-be rescuer Jack. Bob is furious that they left his brother behind, but when Jack says there was nothing that could be done, Bob says he doesn't blame anyone for the decision—he just hates the fact that it was made.
  • Calder breaks his leg and has to be left behind by Carruthers, but when a delirious Van Heusen accuses him of having left Calder behind as bait for the monster so he could escape, Calder (still alive but trapped in another part of the ship) gets on the intercom to defend his action. Bob is later killed trying to rescue Calder because he was reluctant to leave him behind.
• Parodied in Little Miss Sunshine: Frank says this line after Olive is left at a gas station.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Only two people involved in Captain America: The First Avenger: Steve has just pulled his childhood friend Bucky out of a Hydra lab, and they're attempting to escape as the building self-destructs. Bucky crosses an impossible-to-jump pit of fire on an improvised bridge that collapses behind him. Steve tells him to get out; Bucky yells back "No, not without you!" Of course, since it's Steve, he makes the jump.
    • Steve's entire rescue mission is this since he goes in despite his CO expressly stating that there would be no way to complete the rescue mission without getting the prisoners and the rescuing soldiers killed. Steve refuses to accept this, goes behind enemy lines ALONE, rallies the prisoners, and comes back with everyone who didn't die during the escape, and their were only a few on-screen casualties. If the lab hadn't exploded and incinerated everything, he probably would've brought the bodies back, too. After that, there was no doubt amid the soldiers that they were truly in the presence of Captain America!
  • Steve does this again in Captain America: Civil War when he breaks into The Raft to free his entire team. And he does this without any shield or gear. Super-Soldier indeed!
  • Iron Man strongly believes in this, while even Cap above will lament "we can't save everyone", Tony, on the other hand, will do everything in his power to make sure nobody is left to die. For example in Iron Man 3 when Air Force One has it's hull blown open by The Dragon and thirteen people are falling to their deaths, Tony (despite being only able to carry four) makes a Chain of People and uses his thrusters to make sure they all land safely in the water.
    • Also in Avengers: Age of Ultron while most civilians are shepherded off Sokavia, Tony detects a family in one of the buildings and flies in there to save them, even though the building itself is collapsing.
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Drax even says so himself when Peter is in trouble: '...we're family. we leave no one behind.'^note "except Nebula"
• Happens in The Matrix. After nearly being caught by Agents, Morpheus attempts both a Heroic Sacrifice and You Shall Not Pass! in order to allow Neo and the others time to escape. Afterwards, the surviving crew members contemplate pulling the connection from Morpheus, which would kill him but also prevent the Agents from learning access codes to Zion, the last human city. Neo invokes this trope and instead attempts to rescue Morpheus.
• MonsterVerse:
  • Kong: Skull Island: Subverted. This appears to be Lieutenant Colonel Packard's motive for going to rescue a soldier in a crashed helicopter, but it becomes apparent that his main reason is to get hold of the munitions the helicopter was carrying so he can kill Kong, an obsession which puts the lives of all his men in danger.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): In Antarctica, when the Monarch brass's Osprey is knocked into a crevasse and could topple inside at any moment, and with Godzilla and Ghidorah's catastrophic battle raging around them; Dr. Graham stays behind to free Mark of some debris that's pinning him down whilst the others are already evacuating. She succeeds in saving Mark's life, but whilst the two of them are separated from the main group, Ghidorah spots them and kills her.
• Subverted with a Verbal Backspace in Muppets from Space.
  Kermit: We will never leave one of our own behind!
  Fozzie: Hey, we left Bunsen and Beaker back at the gas station!
  Kermit: * pause* From this point on, we will not leave anyone behind!
• Averted in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Part of the pirates' code is "Whoever falls behind is left behind." Many of the characters, both good and bad, follow this. On one occasion they do subvert it, the crew handwave it by saying they viewed that part of the code as "more guidelines than actual rules".
• Averted in Resident Evil (2002). When Kaplan is trapped by zombies he tells the rest of the party to leave him behind. Alice refuses, but Kaplan insists, and they do so.
• The Rock:
  • Averted with dastardly repercussions in the Back Story. General Hummell's request to send in troops to extract at least 15 marines on a Black Operation from the combat zone are denied by his superiors, forcing him to leave them to die.
    Marine: They're not coming for us, are they, sir?
  • The last straw is when the government refuses to pay the families of the dead soldiers due to plausible deniability, which drives Hummell to go rogue.
• Saving Private Ryan:
  • When Captain Miller and his squad are ordered to venture deep into German-occupied France to recover a lost soldier who may already be dead, he and his squad are naturally not too thrilled about this. The rest of the movie then shows their struggle between deciding whether to find Ryan or just leave him behind.
  • The villain version of this trope is used as well. A German sniper purposely shoots and incapacitates an American soldier, hoping that it will draw out other soldiers into the open in an attempt to help the downed man.
• Serenity:
  • Discussed after Mal first shoves a man off their hovercraft who was trying to hitch a ride to escape a Reaver attack, then Mercy Kills him before the Reavers can have their way with him. Zoe gives him a What the Hell, Hero? for the former as Serenity is heading skyward, which Mal rebuffs with, the Mule couldn't fly with the extra weight, none of his crew are expendable, and they plain couldn't afford to dump the cargo either.
    Zoe: Sir, I don't disagree on any particular point. It's just ... in the time of war, we would never have left a man stranded.
    Mal: (bitterly) Maybe that's why we lost.
  • Parodied later.
    Mal: Zoe, the ship is yours. If I'm not back in one hour, you take this ship and you come and you rescue me!
    Zoe: What? And risk my ship?
    Mal: I mean it! It's cold out there, and I don't wanna get left!
• Silent Running. After being stranded in a spacecraft past Saturn, a radio message from Earth points out that they can't rescue him that far out, and suggests suicide. The protagonist refuses, not mentioning he killed his crewmates and deliberately stranded himself out there. Later it turns out a rescue mission is launched, but the protagonist kills himself rather than face judgement as a murderer.
• Averted in the opening of Skyfall when Bond has to leave a fellow agent to bleed to death, in favour of pursuing the man who shot him and stole a microchip containing the identities of NATO undercover agents. The Big Bad turns out to be another SIS agent who was abandoned after he went rogue.
• In The Smurfs, after Papa Smurf gets captured, the rest of the party goes back to rescue him, against his orders.
• Averted early on in Stalingrad (1993). During an assault on a factory, one of the Heer soldiers breaks down in fear and huddles in a foxhole. Wölk briefly attempts to pull him out, but Corporal Rohleder commands him to grab the man's dog tags and leave him. The straggler is promptly killed by artillery.
• In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Chekov is critically injured while fleeing in the form of American aircraft carrier personnel and sent to a hospital where, in the hands of 20th-century medicine, he is not expected to survive. With the clock ticking on their ability to rescue the whales they need to save the future, Bones insists on going to save him. Spock immediately agrees. Kirk asks if it's the logical thing to do, and Spock (who had questioned their decision to save him at the cost of so much) that it's not, but it is the human thing to do.
• A variation occurs in Star Trek Into Darkness. Bones and Carol are on a planet examining a torpedo when something goes wrong and it closes, trapping Bones' hand inside. Since attempting to beam Bones up will result in the torpedo coming too, Bones tells them to just beam Carol out instead. She flat-out refuses, telling them that if she leaves, he'll die. At the last second she simply rips the controls out, stopping the detonation and saving them both.
• Supervolcano (2005). The protagonist is trapped in an abandoned Air Force base. The only airman there says they have to walk out, as no-one is coming to save them. The protagonist asks what happened to "Leave no man behind", and is informed that's the Army's slogan.
• Notably averted in When Trumpets Fade: the film opens with Private David Manning trying to carry his badly wounded friend Bobby through the woods to safety, but he has to stop to rest. Bobby tells him that he can't even stand to be carried any further, and begs Manning to stay with him so that he doesn't have to die alone. Not only does Manning refuse to stay, he shoots Bobby. In a later scene, now-Sergeant Manning specifically orders one of the soldiers under his command to drop the body of a fallen comrade saying simply "Leave him! He's dead!" The film ends with Manning himself badly wounded and being carried to safety by Sanderson before dying from blood loss, Sanderson still carrying his lifeless body.

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