Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+

Fifty-one years ago, in 1972, a chartered Uruguayan Air Force flight, carrying a rugby team alomg with many of their family and friends, crashed in the Andes mountains on its way from Montevideo, Uruguay to Santiago, Chile. There were twelve initial fatalities among the forty passengers and five crew onboard, a number that steadily grew larger during the seventy-two days the survivors spent stranded in the mountains.

This has long been a story widely known around the globe, and I haven’t even yet mentioned the most notorious aspect of it, the very thing that made those who ultimately survived able to do so.

I’m old enough to remember the 1993 film Alive, starring Ethan Hawke, and how riveting and harrowing the crash sequence was near the beginning. It was long ago when I saw this film, and I don’t remember much of it—although I certainly remember the passengers flying out the back of the torn-open plane after it hit the mountain ridge. I also remember the dramatic drop to the knees after the first time one of the survivors takes a bite of human flesh.

This might be the key difference between Alive and Society of the Snow, which does employ some fairly typical cinematic emotional beats, but doesn’t lean much into those kinds of rote dramatic moments. Curiously, the two films were based on different books: Alive was adapted from Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which was published in 1974, only a couple of years after the actual events, but was written by British historian Piers Paul Read. Society of the Snow (La Sociedad de la Nieve) was written far more recently (2008) and thus without the event as fresh in anyone’s memory, but it was by Uruguayan writer Pablo Vierci.

It’s easy to see the potential pros and cons of these two literary accounts, but the disparity becomes wider when we look at the adaptations, with Alive coming straight out of Hollywood, and Socity of the Snow being directed and co-written by Spanish-born J.A. Bayona. Ideally, of course, Society of the Snow would have been made by an actual Uruguayan director. And there is some irony in the fact that Bayona also directed the 2012 film The Impossible, about the 2004 tsunami in Thailand—which cast Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor and Tom Holland to tell a story based on a Spanish family’s real-life experience.

Socity of the Snow, at least, is a Spanish-U.S. coproduction, told in Spanish, based on source material that came from a Uruguayan voice. By all accounts, although there have been many adaptations of the 1972 Andes flight disaster, this one is the most accurate and the most realistic. In fact, there is a sequence well into the film in which one of the survivors takes out a camera and starts taking photos. It made me think: surely there are real life photos that were taken, then, of survivors posing around the wreckage? Indeed, there are—and Society of the Snow recreates them with impressive accuracy.

This is, indeed, a very harrowing film to watch. Thirty years makes a big difference in filmmaking capabilities, and the plane crash sequence in this film is rendered in far greater detail, on a comparable budget (in adjusted dollars). There is clear CGI at work in this movie, but it is put to good use, as the scene is no less jaw dropping for it. In just a few moments, what we see is very violent and horrifying.

The thing to remember about this whole experience, though, is that the crash was only the beginning. It happens about 12 minutes into the film, and the notorious cannibalism doesn’t even start until about 45 minutes in. Another major incident occurs well after that, which is just as harrowing as the initial crash itself. Even though I should have seen it coming, I was so absorbed by the film, it scared the shit out of me. Beyond that, many attempts are made at finding help, a nearly impossible task in the middle of the Andes mountains, unknown miles and miles from civilization.

This entire ordeal is a stunning story, and one could argue that, in motion picture form at least, Society of the Snow has done the best job of it. Everything about it is amazing, even how long many of the people who survived the initial crash lasted before later dying for various reasons. Only 16 of the 45 onboard that plane made it in the end, and this is the story of how those few made it—and many of those nearly didn’t. The film’s runtime is two hours and 24 minutes, but a solid 15 of those minutes are the end credits, which makes this film a solid, standard length, all of which is impossible to look away from. If you have even cursory survivalist interests, this movie, currently available streaming on Netflix, is definitely one to watch.

*It wasn’t as much of a party as it looked.*

Overall: B+