Alive Movie 1993 Download
Magdalen Dano
The amazing, true story of a Uruguayan rugby team's plane that crashed in the middle of the Andes mountains, and their immense will to survive and pull through alive, forced to do anything and everything they could to stay alive on meager rations and through the freezing cold.
Society of The Snow, Netflix's upcoming disaster movie based on true events, promises to level up 1993's adaptation of the same story, Alive. The genre seems to be going through some sort of revival and what better way for Netflix to come on board than with an incredible survival movie based on a true story, which is something that has proved to be loved by a wide audience over the last decade. The film is scheduled to be released on the platform on January 4th, 2024, and is directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, director of The Impossible, which, along with Society of The Snow's trailer, is already promising enough.
The film tells the story of how a Uruguayan rugby team survived 72 days in the Andes after a plane crash. The team was traveling to Chile for a series of friendly matches accompanied by some relatives. Including passengers and the crew, only sixteen out of forty-five survived the tragedy. However, what has captivated the public for half a century is the way those who survived managed not to starve in the middle of the mountains. Although the story has everything to be a hit, the 1993 adaptation accomplished some interesting sequences, but overall failed at capturing the essence of the tale. Society of The Snow promises to fix that.
Although Alive, one of Ethan Hawke's best movies according to Ranker, is a rather accurate adaptation of the story, the film received some criticism over its cast. Considering that the characters in the story are all one hundred percent Latinos and that most of the cast members in Alive are white American actors, it could be said that there was some whitewashing in the making of the movie. This primarily fails to reflect accurately a huge part of the story, which is its characters. However, that is not the only problem, as there are further cultural barriers that stand in the way of making a proper adaptation.
If Alive's cast had been mostly Latino, it would still not have been enough. The story of how that team survived is strongly tied to the fact that they were a Uruguayan rugby team, not just random people. Reflecting Uruguayan culture and language are also very important things that are not present in the film. Again, while the movie excels at achieving an extremely accurate and thrilling plane crash sequence, for instance, it fails at making its characters alive, ironically. The movie being spoken in English doesn't help, as well as cultural details, such as the pilot drinking mate in a very inaccurate way.
Society of The Snow, on the other hand, showcases a different adaptation of one of the most unbelievable true stories, since its cast is mainly Uruguayan and Argentinian. Argentinians from Buenos Aires are culturally very similar to Uruguayans, and they even share the same Spanish accent, so despite not being an all-Uruguayan cast, the cultural issue is fixed. The movie will be spoken in its original characters' language and a Spanish-speaking director will direct the cast, which ensures fluid communication in the making of the film. Furthermore, Carlos Paez Vilaro, one of the survivors, will play his father in the film, which indicates a close involvement from the real survivors.
In addition to the cast being more faithful to the original story, a huge part of the crew is both Uruguayan and Argentinian and, although a great part of the film was shot in Spain, there are also some real locations in Uruguay and the Argentinian and Chilean Cordillera de Los Andes. Despite being invisible elements, these aspects leave a mark on the process of making a film that also contributes to a more accurate cultural representation of the original survival story.
Even though the power of a particular story is measured by how universal its reach is, the details of the events give the whole tale a certain meaning. Society of The Snow's Uruguayan and Argentinian cast not only contributes to a more faithful adaptation of the Miracle of The Andes from a superficial point of view related to physical appearance or language, but it contributes more deeply. The cast is closer to the idiosyncrasies and customs that made it possible for that specific rugby team to survive the way they did, and that surely will have an impact on the final cut of the film.
It was called the "Miracle of the Andes" and any outsider would agree.
However, if triumphing over two months of cold and starvation, punctuated with a deadly avalanche, was nothing short of a miracle, even for people raised in the Catholic faith, that simplification might also satisfy a natural craving for sensationalism while harming the memory of those who died. So a film like Frank Marshall's "Alive" or any documentary retelling the harrowing (and sometimes horrifying) journey of the Vol 571 survivors is, at least in intentions, an extraordinary tribute to human solidarity and determination when facing a cruel adversity.
Released in 1993, the film retells the story of the survivors stranded in the Andean mountains for 70 days in 1972. It opens with an aged one (played by John Malkovich) showing a few pictures caught days before the crash where they're all young, wearing rugby uniforms, their faces illuminated by the sun. What the narrator says is a piece of wisdom inherited from the journey and shared with us outsiders: we can't tell what we would do until we're put in the situation. Besides, it's not just a matter of surrendering to death or fight for life, the question raised by the first ten minutes is even simpler: "would we be among the lucky ones?" so the plane crash sequence isn't just generous in spectacular special effects but in various occasions to contemplate these scary thoughts while watching someone plunging to his death.
The plane sequence is a masterstroke, starting with the set-up: we see young and healthy kids from privileged backgrounds, wearing blazers or spring clothes and all acting like spoiled brats under adult's indulgent eyes, one plays his guitar, another with the microphone, some exchange views about rugby and girls; joy is everywhere and spirits are high, much higher than the plane that finds itself engulfed in a storm and the "air pocket" get so persistent the passengers stop taking them in all stride. Some don't even have time to realize it's no joke, as the tail breaks, they're sucked off the air, then the plane slides down a snow drift, and passengers pray and scream.
Suddenly, the plane stops and the deceleration pushes everything forward, those in the front weren't much luckier than those in the back as they're crushed instantly by the seats piling up on them, and a few kids are literally projected to the cockpit wall. There's absolutely no correlation whatsoever between the seats and the odds, one can unharmed while his neighbor passed away, one would get a black eye and his friend would later die from internal injuries. That's the big lottery of life, who's going to make it and who won't have to bother. "Why you and not me?".
So the questioning of God's will and the omnipresence of religious undertones (something Ebert and Siskel complained about) is actually capital to understand the way the passengers' frames of mind will evolve. It wasn't just a psychological wrestling with the elements but also with a certain vision of God and destiny, a long apprenticeship divided into three chronological phases.
First, the survivors realize that they must form a sort of micro-society and the team captain, confident that the rescuers will come, organizes the rationing: a daily square of chocolate and a sip of wine. The dead are taken out and will never be absent from the site nor their friends' thoughts, seat covers are used as blankets and the first aids are given. Interestingly, it's only after being able to sleep the first night that they feel the exhilaration of being alive. Surviving the night and its freezing effect is one of the key challenges with food, and each day is a new triumph.
But there's a catch in their motivation, it works within the certitude that these solutions are temporary. A few days go, the badly wounded die and the others learn that the searches have been abandoned, a final blow on the captain who feels responsible for giving false hopes and gets depressed. Meanwhile, new leaders emerge: Nando Parrado (Ethan Hawke) who spent the first days dazed and unconscious, wakes up before his sister dies, he takes her to the snow and takes off the coat she wouldn't need anymore, he decides that he must survive even if it means breaking the ultimate taboo, his friend Roberto Canessa (John Hamilton) also knows there's only one alternative to food.
Get busy living or get busy dying; without meat, bodies will fade to a certain death, so it's a whole new dimension of thoughts and perceptions, one that asks for a discussion and a total agreement. The film deals with the desecration soberly, no red flesh is shown, first a few muscle fibers are taken and distributed to the group, like a mystical communion, that chapter is handled rather tactfully until the necessity of meat is validated during the final phase, when an avalanche proves them that the snow and mountain weren't as lifeless and indifferent as they thought, and they were at the mercy of a living entity that could take their lives at any moment. Later, some "meat" would be shown as the only way for the "scouts" to go as far as possible to find a village, the dead offer their muscles, so to speak.
Life will find a way.
A film like "Alive" is more a humbling than a mystical experience, it's a story that transcends our beliefs in our capabilities. And if the film isn't totally flawless, it's simply because some stories, like "Papillon" for instance, are just so larger-than-life than even a film wouldn't do them justice, but speaking for myself, I had seen that film only once on a Sunday night of 1996 before watching it again on Netflix, and I was surprised by how vivid my memory was, and many details stuck to my memory. And at the end, I was cheering as intensely as I did 23 years ago.