Society of the Snow comes more than 30 years after the release of Alive, possibly the most famous movie about the 1972 crash of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes Mountain. It was the second movie to be based on the crash and the story of the survivors. The first is Survive!, a cheap Mexican exploitation movie that changes the names around and now is only popular for starring Hugo Stiglitz, who was a character in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.
Survive! had terrible special effects that feel like they’re from the Ed Wood/Mystery Science Theater 3000 kind and excessive violence. The movie got negative reviews and is mostly forgotten. That’s not to say Alive isn’t without its critics mostly for the casting of actors of European ancestry to play Uruguayans. The 1993 movie featured Ethan Hawke, Josh Hamilton, Jack Noseworthy, Vincent Spano and Ileana Douglas and others in these roles. And they spoke English unless they dropped a little Spanglish here and there.
Alive became infamous for its use of cannibalism in advertising that when they start eating flesh from the deceased it’s not that major of a deal. J.A. Bayona, who directs Society as well as co-writing it, manages to add the same feeling of despair and all that is lost. The characters this time look like they may be starving and losing weight, which they don’t need in subfreezing temperatures. A scene of someone urinating and it comes out almost black really shows the dangers to their bodies that surviving the crash was just the beginning. And their skin becomes sunburnt and chapped due to the elements.
Yet, the biggest problem with this movie is it’s hard to tell anyone apart without them having to referring to each other by name. But it’s mainly because Bayona doesn’t direct the movie by focusing on a few characters the way Frank Marshall did in Alive so when the deaths happen they have more of an impact. Bayona has more of a style typical of Terrence Malick or Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. The crash occurred on Oct. 13, 1972 and the survivors weren’t rescued until Dec. 23 of that year.
Therefore, the scenes have a flow to them as if the days blend together as it’s time seems to end for the survivors as they try to make it through the elements. Bayona and the producers hired a lot of newcomers to play the characters and while it adds to the authenticity, it hurts the overall impact. What the rugby team and their friends and family went through was horrible. Hardly anyone would wish that on their worst enemies.
Still I felt the movie was way too long of a story especially since I already knew the outcome. Neither Robert Contessa (Matias Recalt) nor Nando Parrado (Agustin Pardella) who traveled for 10 days over the Andes to Chile to find help are really fleshed out as much. The movie is narrated by Numa Tarcatti (Enzo Vogrincic) who was the last of the passengers to succumb to the elements after the crash.
As for the crash itself, Bayona does a good job at showing how the plane crashed and we even get gruesome close-ups of people’s legs bending in ways only shown on film when the same thing happened to Joe Theissman. The movie isn’t too exploitive on its violence despite what all happened.
If anything else, Society seems to be made more as a remembrance of those who died and survived. They were young people with their lives ahead of them cut short because of a pilot’s inexperience. Cantessa was only 19 at the time. Others were in their late teens or in their early to mid-20s. Maybe by having a deceased passenger narrate, Bayona wants us to see the team as a whole.
While the 10-day trek by Cantessa and Parrado is noteworthy, it shows what they were willing to go through not just for their own survival, but the rest of their team. The search had been called off because the white color of the plane was hidden in the snow when viewed from a higher elevation. A team works together. They might argue. They might disagree. But they have to come together in the end.
And they had to do it for the ones who didn’t survive.
While I liked it, I liked Alive a lot better. Sometimes just because a movie is about a sensitive subject matter, it doesn’t mean it deserves a lot of praise. Honestly, I don’t think I would want to sit through this movie again. But at the same time, I want to see Alive again.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 