DIRECTOR
Frank
Marshall
SCREENWRITER
John Patrick Shanley
based
on the book by
Piers Paul Read
PRODUCERS
Kathleen Kennedy
Robert Watts
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Peter James
MUSIC
James Newton Howard
EDITORS
William Goldenberg
Michael Kahn
CAST
Ethan Hawke (Nando Perrado)
Vincent Spano (Antonio Balbi)
Josh Hamilton (Roberto Canessa)
John Haymes Newton (Antonio Vizintin)
Sam Behrens (Javier Methol)
Illeana Douglas (Lilliana Methol)
Jack Noseworthy (Bobby Francois)
John Malkovich (Narrator)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 127m
U.S. release: January 15, 1993
Video availability: VHS
Other films
by Frank Marshall
reviewed on this website:
- Congo
(short review)
|
Alive, the go-eat-'em-on-the-mountain survival
saga based on Piers Paul Read's nonfiction bestseller, hits its
peak in the first fifteen minutes. Literally. It's 1972, and
a small plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team over the Andes
to Chile runs into bad weather. Director Frank Marshall (Arachnophobia)
stages what follows about as skillfully as I ever expect to see
it handled. When the plane dips to perilous depths and scrapes
the tip of a mountain, it cracks apart like a great glass piñata;
screaming passengers are sucked out into the sky, seats and all.
The moment is at once horrifying and thrilling -- spectacle with
a cruelly random touch. Later, we will find some of these people
frozen in the snow, still in their seats, like tombstones.
Yet this version of Alive (there was a cheesier film,
Survive!, in 1977) most often sacrifices realism to uplift.
Alive spent twenty years in Hollywood limbo, because studio
executives doubted whether the mass audience was ready for people
eating the dead to survive. The question is moot, since Marshall
doesn't make us watch much of it. Or anything else potentially
upsetting, either. Once the survivors of the crash begin their
long waiting game until help arrives, Alive goes flat
and never really recovers. Part of the problem is that there's
no way to get to know 29 people in two hours; screenwriter John
Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck) singles out five or six of
them, who nevertheless remain cyphers. Once the men among them
start growing beards, there's the new problem of telling them
apart. Each time someone dies, we don't feel the weight of it
because the others don't seem to. Yesterday he was captain of
the rugby team; today he's an appetizer.
Alive gives you the impression that the survivors got
over their initial qualms about cannibalism pretty quickly. According
to Read, "Of all the work that had to be done, cutting meat
off the bodies of their dead friends was the most difficult and
unpleasant .... If the eyes remained open, they would close them,
for it was hard to cut into a friend under his glassy gaze, however
sure they were that the soul had long since departed." The
movie touches on the survivors' spiritual fervor (try counting
how many "Hail Mary"s they say) but doesn't get too
deeply into the notion that many of them considered cannibalism
a sin against God, and had to get past that in order to live.
Instead, Marshall points the camera at the mountaintops gleaming
in the sun, while characters issue such religious belches as
"God is everywhere today."
I suppose I should point out that gorehounds expecting a barf-bag
delight, with entrails pulled from bellies in pink Technicolor,
are in for a letdown. Alive is a very tidy movie about
eating the dead. Here's Read again: "Having overcome their
revulsion against eating the liver, it was easier to move on
to the heart, kidneys, and intestines." In the movie, we
see them nibbling on frozen swatches of buttocks; they might
as well be chewing Slim Jims. We also miss out on the preparation
of the meat (sometimes they cooked it when the weather was fair
enough to allow for a fire). I don't ask for gross gut-munching
á la Dawn of the Dead, but we should have some
sense of the spiritual and physical revulsion these people had
to overcome. That's part of what makes their story remarkable.
But Marshall and Shanley dance around their story's unpleasant
center.
Alive also suffers from a malady common to survival films:
It's tough to sit through. We're stuck in the snow right along
with the survivors; after about half an hour of disappointments,
botched escape attempts, avalanches, and deaths, we'd just as
soon not be in their company any more (and Alive feels
very long). When the lights go up, you hit the aisle running.
Despite the best efforts of stars Ethan Hawke as the heroic Nando
Perrado, Vincent Spano as Antonio Balbi, and Illeana Douglas
(Cape Fear) as Liliana Methol, the characters are interchangeable,
the conflicts underdramatized. And when the helicopters finally
come to the rescue, there isn't quite the rush of adrenaline
we expect and need -- just relief that the ordeal, theirs and
ours, is over. I admire Alive, in an odd way, for staying
true to the mind-numbing boredom and frustration of survival
in the wild. But why should we have to go through it? |
