Naturally, the “Miracle of the Andes” was prime characteristic movie materials, and Society of the Snow shouldn’t be the primary and even the second filmed model of the story. The primary, 1976’s Survive!, was a Mexican manufacturing directed by Rene Cardona, greatest recognized for exploitation cheapies like Night time of the Bloody Apes. Survive! does play like a low-rent shockfest, with primitive visible results, atrocious dubbing, and an emphasis on gore. Hollywood, in the meantime, picked up the story in 1993 when Touchstone Photos tailored Alive from a nonfiction e-book of the identical title by Piers Paul Learn. Directed by Frank Marshall (Arachnophobia), the film stars Ethan Hawke, Josh Hamilton, and a largely white solid because the aircraft’s passengers. A modest hit on the field workplace, the movie has that slick veneer that solely a Hollywood studio can present, however has nonetheless stood for 30 years as the most important cinematic telling of the story.
With this in thoughts, let’s evaluate Alive and Society of the Snow and see how they’re totally different, how they’re alike, and whether or not one is healthier than the opposite.
Hollywood Opening vs. A Religious Framing Machine
For essentially the most half, Alive and Society of the Snow precisely inform the story of Flight 571 in very comparable, and in some circumstances nearly beat-for-beat, style. However each make distinct narrative decisions alongside the way in which: Alive opens and closes with a framing system wherein John Malkovich portrays an older model of Carlitos Páez, one of many survivors who’s performed as a youthful man by Bruce Ramsay. Carlitos provides a couple of phrases originally and finish of the story. It’s a reasonably pointless train that provides nothing of substance to the narrative. Malkovich even actually says, “I’ve nothing extra to say” on the finish of the movie. So the actual story begins instantly afterward, with Marshall placing us proper on the aircraft minutes earlier than it crashes.
Society of the Snow has a extra poetic framing system, however one which arguably makes even much less sense. The story is narrated in voiceover by a personality who really dies two-thirds of the way in which via the image (Enzo Vogrincic’s Numa Turcatti). Because the movie goes on it emphasizes a religious element by way of Numa’s ghostly sacrifice, nevertheless it doesn’t fairly land. Society additionally begins on the bottom, displaying a couple of snippets of the workforce members and different passengers getting ready to depart, earlier than getting onto the aircraft as properly.
From there, the most important occasions of the story—the crash, the preliminary makes an attempt to outlive and ration out what little meals they’ve, the missions to seek out the aircraft’s tail part and retrieve a radio battery, the choice to eat the useless, the terrifying avalanche that took the lives of almost half the remaining survivors, and the ultimate stroll by Canessa and Nando Parrado—happen in each movies in just about the very same sequence. Some particulars are altered or compressed alongside the way in which, however the principle narrative is identical.
An Journey Story vs. A Gritty Story of Survival
Frank Marshall has been primarily a producer for many of his profession—as co-founder of Amblin Leisure along with his spouse, Kathleen Kennedy, and Steven Spielberg, in addition to via his and Kennedy’s personal manufacturing firm—and he has been behind among the greatest hits of the previous 50 years. He’s additionally directed 4 options (and a handful of documentaries), together with Alive, and whereas his course on this movie is competent, it’s additionally pretty workmanlike.