ALIVE! is the movie made from the Piers Paul Read book of the same name. For those who do not have any idea what the subject of the book is, please be forewarned: it's rather rough, although both the movie and the book handle it about as tastefully as they can given the subject matter. A Uruguayan rugby team, accompanied by relatives of some of the players and some friends, heads toward Chile hoping to engage a Chilean team in a match. While en route, the pilot makes what turns out to be a fatal navigational error; the plane lands in the Andes, killing several passengers instantly and injuring some other passengers so badly that these passengers die several days later. Although a number of other passengers die later of a variety of reasons (burial in an avalanche, overwhelming infection and so forth), that isn't the point.
The point is what the sixteen young men who end up surviving the crash do to get back to civilization. They are eventually forced to cannibalize the remains of the dead - literally - in order to obtain enough nutrition to make it for 72 days.
After several false starts, they are eventually successful in sending two young men, Roberto Canessa and Nando Parrado, back down into civilization, after just about everyone except their loved ones thought they'd passed away. The movie ends with the sixteen survivors being Medevaced out of the crash site, in two shifts.
This movie does a superb job of capturing the contents of the book's pages. The book's slow spots are also the movie's slow spots. Where the book speeds up, the movie speeds up. Even the look of the outdoor set is accurate, retaining the look of the pictures the survivors themselves allowed Read to publish in his book of the same name, right down to such tiny details as how survivors looked from the Medevac rescue choppers at the end of the movie. (Just about the only detail we are mercifully spared is the exact way the litter around the fuselage of the crashed plane looked.) I feel that this accuracy is largely the result of having a survivor of the crash, Nando Parrado himself, as a technical advisor.
What was more difficult to convey was the sense of bonding this experience gave the survivors. To this day, I believe many of these men (with one exception) still live in the same neighborhood. Their children go to the same school many of them got their high school diplomas from, and for whose alumni rugby team they were playing at the time of the crash. (Bonus material on the DVD version of ALIVE makes clear that the survivors, due to their proximity to family members of the deceased, have to be very careful about what they say about the deceased members of their party.) No movie can convey what binds them together.
Due to the technical limits of filmmaking - and the natural limits on the patience of moviegoers - the movie also has had to be edited to leave out the reactions these survivors have had to their return to civilization. What is left unclear in the movie is stated frankly in the book; due to their experiences, these young men had a very difficult time, shall we say, remembering to mind their manners. They ate voraciously, and demanded food anytime they wanted it, in any quantities they desired, failing even to remember the basic rules of Uruguayan table manners, among other things. It took a very long time indeed to re-train them to live in civilized society - and they lived in a very affluent suburb of Montevideo, which meant that the expectations on them were greater than they might have been had they been, say, blue-collar or working-class members of society.
However, these are more natural limitations than true flaws in the movie. One can, after all, convey so much on the big screen, and in a movie with cannibalism as a prominent theme, what one can put on the big screen without forcing people to run retching out of the theater is pretty limited. The producers of this movie do an excellent job overall with what material they are given.
In terms of performances, no one single actor stands out. This is a good thing, in a movie like ALIVE, so dependent on ensemble acting to carry the plot to the viewer. The single most accurate performance, based on what I remember of the book, is that of Kevin Breznahan (spelled phonetically), who played survivor Roy Harley in the exact way he was portrayed in Piers Paul Read's book.
Special effects are excellent. Viewers of the movie will likely be convinced that they have watched the plane crash in real life.
I'd recommend this movie mainly for people interested in stories about survival, as well as for those of us who remember the original story of the plane crash that started this whole survival tale off.
Recommended:
Yes
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