Based on a true story from World War II, the film was written, produced, and directed by Brian Falk and starred Garret Dillahunt, Tom Felton, and Jake Abel.

On January 16, 1942, US Navy airmen pilot Harold Dixon, bombardier Tony Pastula and radioman Gene Aldrich, flying a Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bomber from the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, encounter problems on a patrol mission over the South Pacific.

Running low in fuel and unsure of their exact location, Dixon orders his crew to prepare for the ditching and to assemble their survival gear.

After making a successful ditching, the survivors find themselves on a tiny life raft, surrounded by open ocean.

Aldrich is eventually able to kill a shark after it attacks their makeshift fishing rod, which they then eat to stave off starvation, and rainfall initially prevents dehydration, though rations for both dwindle and the 3 are forced to drink their own urine.

As they lost weight, the actors more accurately depicted the stages of starving that took place over 34 days stranded on the ocean.

[6] The Los Angeles Times said Against the Sun was admirable but compared it unfavorably to Angelina Jolie's film Unbroken (2014) which had been released a month before.

Surviving on rainwater and rations the men drifted for 34 days and travelled over 1,000 miles, before landing on the Pukapuka atoll, a friendly island.

The citation read "...for extreme heroism, exceptional determination, resourcefulness, skilled seamanship, excellent judgment and highest quality of leadership".

Both Pastula and Aldrich received presidential commendations for their "extraordinary courage, fortitude, strength of character and exceptional endurance".