Heroic Sacrifice/Film

"Mal: What, it's cold out there. I don't wanna get left."
 * Gran Torino:
 * Perhaps include here also ANY war movie where the flawed character with the shady past calls in an air strike (or artillery barrage, etc) on his own position to save his partner or teammates and redeem himself and his reputation although it means certain death.
 * Flight of the Intruder is the definitive example.
 * Subverted in Platoon;
 * Aliens:
 * Alien 3:
 * Also,  who stays at the bottom of the lead mold to keep the alien from escaping, telling it You Shall Not Pass. Leads into a Dying Moment of Awesome when the alien charges him and he grabs hold of it, taunting it angrily as he is ripped to shreds.
 * Constantine: Unable to stop  from , John Constantine brings the plan to Satan's attention by committing suicide. After setting everything right, Satan offers John a life extension in exchange for his assistance. Already dying from lung cancer, Constantine declines, instead asking that the soul of   be allowed to return to Heaven instead. In doing so, he earns his way into God's good graces, who prevents Satan from taking John to Hell. As his body rises to the heavens - while literally giving the Devil the finger no less - the now angered Satan literally rips the cancer from Constantine's body, restoring him to full health. He does so in order to give John another chance to prove that his soul belongs in Hell, not Heaven.
 * In Coraline,
 * in Dancer in The Dark. In the latter half of the film, is convicted of murder and sentenced to death.  meets with a new lawyer who says  previous lawyer was incompetent and new evidence has been brought forth that could save  from death. The only way to pay for this new attorney is to use the money that . Believing that it is important for,  chooses to die.
 * Occurs in the Death Note live-action movies (but not the original manga or anime).
 * The wizard Ulrich, who sacrificed himself twice in Dragonslayer (1981). His first death and his 2nd death.
 * In End of Days, Satan has until midnight on New Year's Eve to impregnate the chosen bearer of his child, and having been thwarted once by her bodyguard Jericho Cane and running out of time, he possesses Jericho himself in a last ditch effort to rape her. Jericho is able to resist Satan's control just long enough to allow her to escape and impale himself on protruding sword of a nearby statue. Midnight passes, Satan is driven out of his body and back to hell, and Jericho dies. Since Jericho regained control with only five seconds left on the time limit, this may also double as a Stupid Sacrifice.
 * Enemy at the Gates. In the middle of a sniper stalemate in between main protagonist Vasily and the German Cold Sniper, Vasily's friend-slash-sentimental-rival, quite jealous that the Love Interest (now presumed dead) has chosen Vasily over him and disillusioned with the communist cause,.
 * In Event Horizon,
 * The original Godzilla has Doctor Serizawa using his Oxygen Destroyer to kill the titular monster, but, fearing that it will become weaponized by governments, destroys all his notes and allows himself to be killed by it as well, destroying the knowledge of its creation forever.
 * In Mothra vs. Godzilla, Mothra goes into battle against Godzilla knowing full well that she will die.
 * And in Godzilla and Mothra -- The Battle for Earth Battra sacrifices himself to help Mothra trap Godzilla at the bottom of the sea.
 * Topping that, in Godzilla: Final Wars, Mothra,
 * Then there's Godzilla: Tokyo SOS in which Kiryu (A cyborg version of that somehow manages to gain self-awareness)
 * Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack gets three of these with Baragon, Mothra (who ) and King Ghidorah.
 * Independence Day, the bit where the often drunk, semi-washed up crop duster flies his plane into the alien superweapon just before it fires, and blows the whole ship to pieces.
 * The Iron Giant:
 * The Star-Crossed Lovers in Last of the Mohicans. May count as a Stupid Sacrifice if you think about it too much, since   is the Last of His Kind and apparently decided Only I Can Kill Him.
 * And when offers to be burned alive in  place, and then  deliberately mistranslates the offer so he gets killed instead....
 * in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; nearly everyone except the main characters that attacked Miraz's castle in Prince Caspian. Averted when sacrifices himself to save, as he knew he would live.
 * Mission to Mars: The rescue mission's leader does a slightly accidental Heroic Sacrifice when he  and a more deliberate one when he
 * The Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy is rife with Heroic Sacrifices and attempts at the same, including the fate of James Norrington.
 * Subverted in Serenity, where River pretty much declares You Shall Not Pass to the Reavers and locks herself in a room filled with them to save her friends and family. Five minutes later, after everyone pretty much believes that she's been raped, killed, eaten, and possibly worn like clothing by the horde (in that order, if she's lucky), the doors slide back open....to reveal her standing completely uninjured and knee deep in enemy corpses.
 * No power in the 'verse can stop her.
 * Also subverted earlier in the same film. Mal is going to take the shuttle to meet with Inara and spring The Operative's trap. He explicitly tells Zoe that if they do not hear back from him in an hour, "You come and you rescue me".

"Richards: He saved my life. It should be me down there."
 * During the final assault on Ecoban at the climax of Sky Blue, Goliath jams a bomb onto Locke's tank and detonates it, destroying the tank and killing himself in the process. Unfortunately, Locke survives.
 * Space Cowboys:
 * Spider-Man 2: After getting the senses smacked back into him, pulls  into the water with him, saving New York City.
 * Spider-Man 3:
 * This one can also be found on the Stupid Sacrifice page.
 * Star Trek
 * Star Trek II the Wrath of Khan
 * While under Khan's Mind Control, Captain Terrell is ordered to kill Admiral Kirk. Realizing he can't resist the order, he kills himself with his own phaser to save Kirk's life.
 * Spock's death at the end, when he fixes the Enterprise's warp core and enables the ship to escape the impending blast of the Genesis Device, but dies from radiation poisoning.
 * Data does the same thing in Star Trek: Nemesis.
 * Star Trek (2009)
 * And we would be very remiss to forget  staying onboard the Kelvin to protect the escape shuttles from enemy fire. The conversation with his wife where he tells her he loves her steers this straight into Tear Jerker territory, no pun intended.
 * rams his dying starship down the throat of a many-spiked alien death fortress to save his wife and newborn son. If that isn't a Dying Moment of Awesome, I don't know what the hell is.
 * "Your father was captain of a starship for 12 minutes. He saved eight hundred lives, including your mother's, and yours. I dare you to do better." Crowning Line of Awesome!
 * Subverted. Spock attempts to do the same thing with the Jellyfish, but
 * In Star Trek V the Final Frontier Sybok tries to mind meld with "God" so Kirk, Spock and McCoy can escape. He doesn't survive the process.
 * Star Wars IV: A New Hope: Obi-wan raises his lightsaber and allows Vader to kill him, so that Luke will leave immediately instead of waiting for him.
 * In The Empire Strikes Back we get a villainous example when Capt. Needa apologizes to Vader personally after losing the Falcon to prevent his crew from facing any reprisals.
 * Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi: Darth Vader stops the Emperor torturing Luke and is electrocuted in the process.
 * In Terminator 2, Miles Dyson -- one of the scientists primarily responsible for the development of Skynet and its technologies -- is mortally wounded by a SWAT team infiltrating Cyberdyne Systems. He stays behind while the heroes escape in order to detonate their explosives and destroy all the research on Skynet.
 * The T-800 himself also gets one, when he lowers himself into molten metal to destroy himself and ensure that Judgement Day never occurs.
 * In Terminator 3, T-800 pulls out his remaining nuclear fuel cell, stuffs it into Terminatrix's mouth, says "You're Terminated", and is promptly consumed by the fuel cell's explosion.
 * Terminator: Salvation absolutely takes the cake.
 * From The Lord of the Rings: "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!!!"
 * In Transformers: Revenge Of the Fallen,
 * Optimus Prime himself kinda has one of these, after . He got better at the end of the film though by coming Back From the Dead (in true Optimus Prime tradition).
 * Jazz also gets one of these in the first film. He attempts to fight Megatron alone, whilst the others are retreating, in order to buy them time. Given Megatron's immense size and power in comparison with Jazz, he was rather easily beaten, but even when Megatron prepared to finish him off, Jazz still goaded him.
 * In Volcano, a train supervisor is going in with the rest of the men to save the passengers and the train operator, who have been trapped in a rail car that is being engulfed by lava. He chases the others out before they succumb to fumes or heat and goes to get last person left, the operator, dragging him out "fireman's carry" on his shoulders, and we can see the train has already gotten so hot from the approaching lava that his shoes are melting as he starts reciting the Lord's Prayer ("Our father, who art in heaven..."). As he reaches the front of the train, lava has already gotten around in front of the train. The other railroad employees, who have escaped into the clear and can't reach him, implore him to jump and save himself. With only seconds to spare, holding the man on his shoulders, he jumps, landing in the pool of lava, then, with the last of his strength, throws the other man clear.
 * Also, the SWAT team/demolitions guy who gets pinned under some rubble while he and his partner place explosives critical to the survival of L.A. Knowing that they'd never get the guy out in time, they give the "all clear", leading to the explosives going off, saving L.A. Touching.
 * Subverted in The Hunt for Red October. As the Soviet sub is being evacuated following the  reactor accident, Captain Ramius tells the ship's doctor to go with the crew in the life rafts while Ramius and the officers submerge and "scuttle the ship" (to which the doctor replies that Ramius will "receive the Order of Lenin"). Unbeknownst to the doctor and crew, Ramius intends to   The crew is rescued by a U.S. destroyer, upon whose deck they see the surface elements of an undersea battle, culminating in an explosion which they believe destroys the Red October.
 * of In Bruges
 * In The Dark Knight, Batman confesses to the killing of all of Harvey "Two Face" Dent's victims and takes the fall in order to protect Dent's image as the 'good guy' that the city needs. He becomes a fugitive from this point on, even though he did not kill Dent's victims.
 * Nearly EVERYBODY in Damnatus. Injured Oktavian stays behind and blows himself up when discovered. Adeodatus grenades himself to both try and destroy the daemon and prevent his own possession . Von Remus pulls a You Shall Not Pass to let Nira escape. Nira herself then dies trying to banish G'guor. Farseer Phaer makes one too...from beyond the grave!
 * "In this universe, one is either sacrificed or sacrifices themself." Arc Words indeed.
 * In the final cut of the I Am Legend movie, blows himself up with a bunch of zombies in the end so that the woman and her child can escape with the vaccine that would cure the zombies.
 * In Resident Evil Extinction, Betty sacrifices herself by trapping herself in a bus with a horde of undead ravens and blowing up the bus. Later in the film,
 * In Sunshine, physicist Capa - and arguably Cassie - sacrifice themselves to ensure the bomb successfully detonates.
 * Heck, nearly the entire cast dies in separate heroic sacrifices: Kaneda gets obliterated by the sun repairing the solar shield, Mace dies of hypothermia repairing the mainframe, and Searle stays behind on the Icarus I in order to operate the airlock (even though he then commits suicide by subjecting himself to 100% exposure to the sun, he was only hastening his inevitable death). Even Trey arguably sacrifices himself by suicide, so the rest of the crew has enough air to survive.
 * In 9|Nine,  attempts to do this in order for , but.
 * District 9: through his Heel Face Turn, Wikus ultimately decides to help Christopher get to the dropship, even if it means he himself will either die or live and transform completely.
 * The Running Man. Laughlin shoves Richards out of the way and is mortally wounded by Buzzsaw's attack.
 * The Running Man. Laughlin shoves Richards out of the way and is mortally wounded by Buzzsaw's attack.

"Mitch: So, who's with me?
 * At the end of the classic giant-ant movie Them, trooper Ben Peterson sacrifices himself to save two young boys.
 * Jurassic Park The Lost World: Eddie saves Nick, Sarah and Malcolm from falling off a cliff by securing a cable to the sliding trailer and throwing a rope to the others.
 * Armageddon is a disaster film where anything that can possibly go wrong does. At the end of the movie, in order to detonate a nuke that destroys a meteor destined for Earth, one person has to stay back and manually detonate it because the remote detonator was broken (of course). Naturally they draw sticks and Ben Affleck's character drew the shortest stick. However, as he leaves the ship to fulfill his duty, Bruce Willis who had planned all along to be the one to do it immediately cuts off Affleck's oxygen supply and locks him inside the ship, taking his place and sacrificing himself to save all of humanity and the Earth.
 * Deep Impact, a similar movie to Armageddon has the entire shuttle crew with the nukes sacrifice themselves on the same mission.
 * In Air Force One, an F-16 pilot interposes his plane between a missile fired at the titular plane by a MiG. Apparently, he did not think to eject before impact.
 * Needed to stay to the end to ensure success.
 * In the Babylon 5 made-for-TV movie A Call To Arms, Captain Anderson rams the IAS Victory into the control node of the Shadow Planetkiller, saving Earth from destruction. As usual, this is preceded by a clenched fist and the phrase "Ramming speed!"
 * In the Hungarian animated film Vuk aka The Little Fox Vuk or Vic's (as he's known in the U.S. dub) uncle Karrack gives his life to save him and his mate Foxy from a hunter's bullet.
 * Childs Play 3: Whitehurst jumps on a live grenade to save his friends.
 * The Last Unicorn with
 * Uwe Boll seems to have an obsession with this trope...particularly when it's completely unnecessary for the "hero" to sacrifice him or herself.
 * The Exorcist:
 * X2: X-Men United and X Men the Last Stand: accomplishes this, twice: The first time, when the Blackbird is frozen at Alkali Lake with the dam about to burst in mere minutes,  steps off the jet and uses her now heightened telekinesis to break the ice and allow the jet to lift off, at the same time psychically restraining her teammates to keep them from stopping her.
 * Having survived this in X3 but also becoming the twice regains her sanity long enough to beg  so she won't kill anyone else. He finally relents at the movie's climax and
 * The Last Starfighter with Also it's a case of an inverted trope as at the end of the movie
 * In Tangled,
 * In the climatic battle at the end of the final movie in The Matrix series, Neo jacks himself into the virtual world once more, but not before making a deal with the Machines:
 * Subverted in the first film with Morpheous. He attacked Agent Smith with the full knowledge that he wasn't going to win/escape. When the surviving crew members contemplate whether or not to pull the connection on him to prevent the Agents from obtaining the access codes for Zion, the last human city, Neo instead takes an alternative option; to simply go back in and rescue their leader. Several gun fights later, he succeeds with a Gunship Rescue.
 * In Tron, Flynn decides to jump into the Master Control's matrix to act as a distraction and save Tron after getting a Last Kiss from Yori. Luckily, that ends up not only working, but also shoves him back into the analog world.
 * In Tron: Legacy, however, Tron's Last Stand against Clu's guards turns out to be a Senseless Sacrifice . "Rinzler" ends up with a Heroic Sacrifice of the Redemption Equals Death variety as he   and fends off Clu's forces, only to get a Disney Villain Death. And then, Flynn makes a second Heroic Sacrifice to.
 * The Predator films
 * In Predator, makes a last stand on a log bridge to give the rest of the team time to escape.
 * In Predator 2, blocks the Predator from following the fleeing subway passengers and pays for it with his life.
 * Two deaths in Friday the 13 th films come from heroic sacrifices; Friday the 13th (film) has Duke handcuffing himself into Jason to slow him down and Sgt. Brodski in Friday the 13th (film) catches Uber Jason in the vacuum of space and drags him into Earth Two's atmosphere, burning them both up.
 * A funny and mild version in Dirty Work:

dead silence

Mitch: Alright, who's with me on the understanding that if this plan fails, you all get to beat the crap out of me?

crowd becomes very enthusiastic"


 * Near the end of the hospital battle in Hard Boiled, two of the SWAT team officers charged with getting the newborns safely out of the building use their kevlar vests to protect the babies. Immediately after securing the infants inside of the vests, they're riddled with bullets that they might otherwise have survived.
 * Captain America: The First Avenger:
 * in Mystery Team with  getting shot trying to calm down his friends and convincing the shooter to let them go.
 * Buck the silverback gorilla in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. When the helicopter starts shooting down the apes, Buck knocks Caesar out of the line of fire and leaps at the aircraft, taking multiple and fatal gunshot wounds but succeeding in destroying it.
 * In the movie Phantom of the Paradise, the first song is about a singer who kills himself to get the money for his sisters life saving operation. Later Winslow sacrafices himself to save Phoenix.
 * The two main characters Chris and Theta in Alien Cargo, who choose to remain in their dying spaceship to prevent a dangerous virus from reaching civilization.
 * Vertical Limit has several, starting with the main characters' father. Another one combines this with Taking You with Me, leading to the death of the main antagonist.
 * In the climax of Cowboys and Aliens,  went into the core of the aliens' spaceship and activated the bracelet's self-destruct bomb, knowing theres only a couple of seconds for the bomb to go off.
 * In Stranger Than Fiction Harold Crick discovers from his author that his fate is to
 * At the end of Sherlock Holmes:A Game of Shadows, Moriarty tells Holmes that he will kill Watson and his wife for Holmes' destroying Moriarty's plans. With Holmes too injured to fight,
 * Sucker Punch has two heroic sacrifices
 * The thirteen samurai who accept the suicide mission of assassinating Lord Naritsugu in 13 Assassins. The chances of survival are almost nil and they know this going in--they fight not for money or fame, but to kill a monster who is a threat to all of Japan.
 * Darby in Darby O Gill and The Little People.
 * Yinsin sacrificing himself to buy Tony time in the first "Iron Man"
 * In The Avengers,  sacrifices himself by catching the nuke headed for Manhattan and flying it out into space through the wormhole, fully expecting to be trapped there and die (he survives, but only due to luck -- Natasha warned him it was a "One-way trip"). Also a Call Back to his argument with Steve earlier in the film, when the latter accused him of being incapable of sacrificing himself for someone else.