STAR RATING: ***** Brilliant **** Very Good *** Okay ** Poor * Awful
The true life story of a Uraguyan rugby team, who in October 1972, crash landed by plane in the Andes mountains on their way to play a rival team in Chile. With no sign of any rescue coming, and forced to go days without food and water, the 29 who survived out of the 45 on the plane, find themselves forced to resort to cannibalism, which leaves a horrific stain on their hearts and souls, before embarking on a desperate quest for survival.
Although I never saw it (I was too young and my mom wouldn't let me), I do still remember the film Alive from 1992, which depicted the same incredibly true life tale that has now been dramatised by writer/director J. A. Bayona in this epic foreign language effort. It's such an astonishing true life tale that it does warrant a second big screen re-telling, especially after such a large passage of time, and Bayona has certainly pulled the cat out of the bag, and delivered a marvellous, full scale drama, that gives a wonderfully human touch to its subjects.
With a two and a half hour runtime to work through, Bayona doesn't take too much time establishing the characters, or developing them much, other than enforcing that they're all great friends, but quickly creating a sense of isolation and claustrophobia, with a group of ordinary people plunged into a terrifying situation that nobody could imagine. The survivors, even with the desperation of their situation, and their own fate on the line, remain genuinely torn between their sense of morality and survival, when the proposition of cannibalism is posed. While the length does cause it to drag in places, this actually adds a further degree of realism, as this must have been the case for the survivors in reality. It's the simple things, like a scene where a rhyming game is used for humourous effects, that gives it this simple realism that separates it from the theatricality of a Hollywood production.
In a tale of such desperation and hopelessness, it's nice to have some sense of respite, and there is some beautiful, sweeping cinematography of the snow soaked Andes mountains, awesome beauty in the face of a living Hell. This is a riveting tale, of a true life tragedy that claimed a number of innocent lives, and no doubt led to change so that nothing like it could happen again. But also, that survival can be a truly viable real life option. ****
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