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Alive
Based on real events, the extraordinary story of how a team of Uruguayan rugby players survived by eating the dead after their plane crashed in the Andes. With Ethan Hawke
To get the sensational stuff out of the way first - yes, Alive is a film which describes how the passengers of a Uruguayan Air Force flight in 1972 survived for over two months in the barren Andes after their plane came down, finally feeding on the frozen bodies of their friends. It sounds like a grisly cut from the grindhouse, but not only is Frank Marshall's film an account of unimaginable pain - physical, spiritual and mental - it eventually takes on an almost mystical aspect as cannibalism, the final taboo, is reconfigured as a strange form of holy communion. Nando Parrado (Ethan Hawke) and Antonio Balbi (Vincent Spano) are members of a Uruguayan rugby team on their way to Chile. Aboard the flight are 45 passengers - the team and their friends and family. The plane crashes into the desolate, snow-covered Andes. As it becomes clear that any rescue operation has been abandoned, and with the survivors unable to make contact with the outside world, they are forced to live on whatever provisions they can find amid the wreckage, stumbling along on a diet of chocolate slivers and dribbles of wine, carefully dispensed by the team captain. As the days become weeks and the weeks become months, malnutrition and the cold take their toll. Eventually it becomes clear that their only hope of survival is to send a team over the mountains in search of either the plane's radio battery or civilisation. But by that point the food has run out, the body count is rising and hope hangs in the balance. Marshall's film was adapted from the 1974 book by undervalued British novelist Piers Paul Read, a Catholic writer who conducted interviews with those survived the ordeal and who tried to make sense of the horror they faced. (This isn't the only attempt to dramatise these events. Three other films, including the documentary Alive: 20 Years Later have also told the story.) After the grim crash sequence which opens Alive - still among cinema's most traumatic in-flight experiences - the pace slows right down and the focus grows tighter, as if reflecting the reduced perspective of the victims as their options and energy diminish. It's a solid script and the cast - who, it has to be said, never quite lose the glow associated with healthy young actors - underplay the story's most lurid aspects. Some may feel that Marshall - more commonly employed as an actor and producer - doesn't sufficiently acknowledge the nightmarish desolation which clearly accompanied those 10 long weeks in the snow, or that he skids over the squeamishness and moral ambivalences to which the survivors must surely have been subject. But as the film arrives at the inevitable point when life starts to depend on death, Alive becomes suddenly sensitive to the sacrifice that took place in the mountains as the dying give themselves up for food. Hawke, Hamilton and Hayes are the survivors who eventually summon the strength to go in search of rescue and if - apart from the young Hawke - they are low on charisma, they're characters are convincingly courageous. An uncredited John Malkovich bookends the film with a voiceover looking back on these events from a distance, the strange strain of hope and heroism conveyed here expressed in the film's triumphant title. Verdict An unexpectedly touching drama the human spirit's capacity to endure. |
