I first read 'Alive' at age 10. Yeah, probably too young considering its heavy subject matter. That book changed my life, Straight-up SAVED my life. I've read that book at least 15 times over the years, I knew all the names, all the faces in the black and white photos in that winter wasteland. And of course when we read we imagine, we put our own visuals into our minds that best fit the narrative as we understand it thru the text on a page. The tragedy, the desperation, and the horror is what stands out at face value, and it IS a horrific story, but unfortunately most people know this story due to the consumption of human flesh to survive, but I assure you, this is NOT what this story is about and it never has been. The truth is the story of The Survivors of the Andes is a love story, the love for family, the love for friends, the love for life. The story of 'Alive' isn't about death, so make no mistake. And at my lowest points, when I thought all was lost, this is the story that would creep into my mind, and I would imagine (there's that word again: IMAGINE) what it must've been like to be on the side of that mountain, on that glacier, in that real-life scenario having to eat my dead friends as I freeze, knowing I'm starving to death, watching my brothers starve to death, dying from their injuries, freezing 13,000' up in the Andes and no one is looking for you, you know the search has been called off. ... and I'm trying to IMAGINE that, to visualize that, because REAL people lived this, experienced this, and its almost too much to comprehend, to visualize and IMAGINE what that was like, not only the outward visual, what you see with your eyes, the plane, the mountain, the scene, but also the emotion of that experience. How do you really ever understand the emotional aspect of such a terrible tragedy? The EMOTION involved in such desperate times. That's key here. How do you imagine that? You can't really, if you didn't experience it.
Imagine...
In 1993, 19 years after I first read the book, Frank Marshall released his version of Alive in film form, with Ethan Hawke and I was beyond excited... but it failed to capture the emotion of the story, and for me, it pretty much failed in all aspects. A Hollywood-ized version of the book. A complete let down. If you haven't seen it, don't bother, I think it kinda sucks. It didn't capture what I had IMAGINED. It fell flat in my opinion but that was as good as it gets.
Even on the edge of life and death, the part of the story that ALWAYS really stood out to me was in the midst of all that sorrow and pain, physical and mental, the survivors never lost sight of the natural beauty that surrounded their crashed plane, their Home in Hell... the majesty of those mountains, with its sharp black rocks the size of buildings reaching to the heavens. It was a sight I NEEDED to see with my own eyes, I needed to stand in person where that plane had come to a stop, broken and twisted. I needed to see what they saw. I needed to sleep there for a night just to experience 0.0001% of the story of 'Alive.' If there was ONE place on Earth I needed to visit, it was the Valley of Tears in Argentina, high up in the Andes, one of the most remote places on the planet.
So I did in January 2016.
It is probably the most miserable night of my life. Cold, windy, hard to breathe because of the altitude, couldn't sleep for more than a half-hour at a clip and I wouldn't change it for the world. It was here, on this trip to South America, where I (we) met Alive Survivor Eduardo Strauch Urioste. He was part of the trip, part of our group, he accompanied us from the start in Mendoza, 12 of us in total. And as we stood as a group on that hallowed ground where the crashed plane once rested I was able to see that majesty of those mountains, that 2000' headwall to the west, the elongated rectangular 'famous rock' in the photos behind the plane. I was able to see the thousands of stars in the sky at night, not hampered by the lights of civilization, the glow of the endless snow in a location shrouded in blackness. And even then I would try to imagine the airplane, the conversations of the survivors, the sickening dread of being the last man alive, the sole survivor, possibly losing all sanity until he, too, is gone to the elements, forever nothing more than a memory.
Imagine...
You cannot, I could not, even spending time in that exact location with a MAN WHO LIVED IT, who encouraged the questions from a bunch of strangers, nothing off limits, because one doesn't go to this place on a whim, you go to this place because it draws you there, it invades your mind, invades your heart. It won't let go, and it pulls you there. We all had our demons that led us to this place. Its a place of Salvation. It calls you in, yet I still could not truly imagine, envision, the reality of those 72 days in 1972.
Imagine...
And then, after waiting for 48 years -- yes, 48 YEARS -- since I read that book as a boy, Director J. A. Bayona delivers the film 'Society of the Snow' and I no longer have to try to imagine, as I've now seen it, on film, on a big theater screen. AND IT IS INTENSE. Unlike the first 1993 film, this film has character development prior to boarding the ill-fated Flt 571, and it includes everyone, survivors and deceased, as it should.
Okay, the plane crash itself: you won't find a more horrific one on film. I remember my knees actually shaking when the pilot is trying to pull up, the sound of the roaring engines, the fear on the faces of the actors, the passengers... and then impact, and no imagining in the world lives up to this scene in the movie. Horrifyingly real from both outside and inside the plane. ... The accuracy of the crashed plane itself is almost exact, if not totally exact (I put pics of the real plane against the movie plane and it is ASTONSHING how accurate that crashed movie plane is to the real thing). I no longer have to imagine what it looked like, in motion, as if I were walking around it, because this film does that for us. I bring this up first because of course the airplane plays a central role and is the one central material object. In fact, the detail of this entire film is accurate, down to their clothing, sunglasses...
And of course that leads to the mountains, because if you saw the '93 film you would know that didn't look anything like the real place, it looked like the Canadian Rockies, because they were. Not this movie: what you see onscreen IS the real location where this story takes place. Everything you see in those mountains surrounding that plane is the real place. You want realism, accuracy? Well, Society of the Snow delivers this with perfect detail.
Make-up: If this film doesn't win awards for make-up, someone on the Awards Board needs to be fired. This isn't "I'm Ethan Hawke and I won't grow a beard" bs. These actors literally look like they've been starving on the side of a mountain, their faces burned by the sun, the blistered lips, the filth from being stranded for two months, the injuries sustained in the crash. This is not a bloody gory film, nor does it need to be, but you do not doubt that these men have been stranded for over two months. The realism, again, leaves little to imagine, and that's why we're at this movie, right? To live this story as close as we can for those of us who were not there. Cinematography: The Andes are HUGE and this film captures the immense size of these mountains, this location, the distances so vast, so far. And I've been there so I can say on the big screen it does what is intended, to show the size and remoteness of these mountains, with that little unseen spec of a plane lost and invisible in the glaring white of snow and ice. Another thing the cinematography captures well is temperature. This isn't a little snow machine the film crew used, but instead you FEEL the cold, you feel the frozen nights, you feel the wind. You FEEL the SUFFERING of what you see on the screen. And in my mind probably the most important part of this film: you get to see the emotion behind the consumption of the bodies, the inner battle they had to face together, the pain of the situation that drove them to do the unthinkable, but as Nando Parrado once said in a documentary "The human brain will elevate you to heights you didn't believe were possible to survive. Had you been there you would have been one of us, doing what we did." No less truth has ever been spoken. This is of course a hard decision, but to see it played out with such competent actors on a crashed plane set that is an exact copy of the real thing, with the expressions of the fear of this act, and the revulsion, cannot be denied. This movie does not bring in the camera to the see the use of the knife, nor should it out of respect to all involved, families of the deceased, and the film doesn't need to. You know what is going on from afar, and I'm glad there is no sensationalism of this part of the story, but based in truth, and the actors really pull this off well, we feel for them, we see their pain in what they MUST do to survive and it is heart-wrenching.
No more imagining, THIS IS the film I've waited 48 years to see. 10 Stars. A-Plus and All That. Sorrow, Joy, and everything in between. You don't leave this film without it having an impact on you. It's not fiction.
