With The Snow Society sweeping Netflix , it is inevitable that Alive (or Live!) will return to the conversation , the Hollywood film that adapted the tragedy of the plane crash in the Andes in 1993 with a cast of stars such as Ethan Hawke , Josh Hamilton or John Malkovich. The comparisons with the new film by JA Bayona , which stands as one of the favorites for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, bring to the table debates such as, for example, which of the two titles is of higher quality, which is more truthful to the events, which is more respectful or which pays better tribute to the victims of the accident.
However, as our vision is so focused on the hegemony of the mecca of cinema, few tend to remember that before The Snow Society or Alive there was already another film that brought this story to our screens. In fact, it was a Mexican production released a few years after the tragedy and, in that decade of the '70s when commercial cinema was still taking its first steps in extreme proposals, it aroused a strong impact due to the issue of anthropophagy . for how he dealt with the survivors surviving by eating the flesh of the deceased. Although in a bad way.
Titled Survivors of the Andes , it was made in Mexico in 1976 by René Cardona , a legendary director from the golden age of Mexican cinema who crossed all types of genres with films such as Santo contra el rey del corazón , La llorona , El enmascarado de plata , The horrifying human beast or Duel in El Dorado and who we also saw as an actor in classics like Allá en el rancho grande . Like The Snow Society or Alive , this title was based on previous literary material, based on the book Survive written in 1973 by Clay Blair Jr. It is not that in the narrative it represented a huge difference with what these other two films did later, although in its dramatic treatment it did have another approach, and a quite controversial one that even bothered the real survivors.
Perhaps due to a tight budget, the film was quite flat when it came to translating the real story to the screen . With a duration of less than an hour and a half, it barely has room to develop its characters. It relies heavily on a voice-over in overexplanatory passages that are far from creating an emotional depth at the level of what we have seen in The Snow Society . To compensate for this, the film resorts to artificial resources to shock , such as a pounding soundtrack or excessive recreation in the most morbid passages of the event, such as the question of feeding on the bodies of the victims.
An explicit show that did not value its implications
Seeing the phenomenon surrounding the new Netflix adaptation , I went to discover this version where I found excessively long and explicit shots of the characters cutting the deceased, the camera delights in showing their cuts and wounds, the moments where we see them eating They look in very bad taste and you feel that there is no tact in presenting the scenes.
The rejection it generates is immense, because you feel that they are making a bloody spectacle of a real tragedy , using morbidity to shock when everything that surrounds this situation has been a trauma for many people . Precisely, one of the details in which The Snow Society has been very careful when addressing the events of the accident.
I don't think it is intentional, but rather the result of the lack of capacity to generate dramatic conflicts due to lack of resources. Considering how creepy this story became, it's the only thing that stands out when all the other elements of the film are excessively flat . Furthermore, considering that in that decade cinema had barely welcomed bloody and explicit horror stories, the inexperience in this aspect is understandable.
This was partly the reason why critics of the time, including the major American entertainment media, attacked this Mexican adaptation of the accident . "No character development, just plastic snow and real flesh," wrote a review in The Barb newspaper in the '70s. “They have released an inept, boring, poorly dubbed film into English in the hope of greedily capitalizing on the public's interest in seeing people skinned,” highlighted the Phoenix Arizona Republic .
The famous critic Roger Ebert spoke of “a Mexican film made in a simple and inartistic way,” and although he stressed that he did not find it excessively macabre, he pointed out that “it addresses cannibalism in a very direct way” despite being “quite silly” and present a “true story of very compelling power.”
The actual survivors of the tragedy were also unconvinced by the outcome. We cannot know what everyone thought, but Gustavo Zerbino , one of them, in an interview with the newspaper El Mundo highlighted how much this film horrified him. He considered it respectful, but he saw it as full of inconsistencies that did not do any justice to the experience they lived in the Andes.
“The first film, a Mexican one, is a very respectful version, but very bad. At night they went out to pray the rosary around the plane at 40 degrees below zero...”, he highlighted. “If I am here it is because The Snow Society literally puts you in the mountains. It makes you live and feel what we live and feel,” he clarified about this new Netflix film and its difference with these previous versions.
For all this, it is understood that Survivientes de los Andes has not prevailed in the collective memory and that we only had Alive in mind when we thought about previous adaptations of this plane crash that in the '70s shocked Latin America and the entire world. It's not that it was the worst film in the world, because it is quite entertaining and enjoyable to watch and was also a box office success in its day, but it has quite excessive setbacks that for a story of this magnitude are difficult to overlook. If you want to discover it to complement your viewing of The Snow Society , you can watch it on Prime Video or for free with ads through Plex or Tubi .
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