Naturally, the “Miracle of the Andes” was prime feature film material, and Society of the Snow is not the first or even the second filmed version of the story. The first, 1976’s Survive!, was a Mexican production directed by Rene Cardona, best known for exploitation cheapies like Night of the Bloody Apes. Survive! does play like a low-rent shockfest, with primitive visual effects, atrocious dubbing, and an emphasis on gore. Hollywood, meanwhile, picked up the story in 1993 when Touchstone Pictures adapted Alive from a nonfiction book of the same name by Piers Paul Read. Directed by Frank Marshall (Arachnophobia), the movie stars Ethan Hawke, Josh Hamilton, and a largely white cast as the plane’s passengers. A modest hit at the box office, the film has that slick veneer that only a Hollywood studio can provide, but has nevertheless stood for 30 years as the major cinematic telling of the story.
With this in mind, let’s compare Alive and Society of the Snow and see how they’re different, how they’re alike, and whether one is better than the other.
Hollywood Opening vs. A Spiritual Framing Device
For the most part, Alive and Society of the Snow accurately tell the story of Flight 571 in very similar, and in some cases almost beat-for-beat, fashion. But both make distinct narrative choices along the way: Alive opens and closes with a framing device in which John Malkovich portrays an older version of Carlitos Páez, one of the survivors who is played as a younger man by Bruce Ramsay. Carlitos offers a few words at the beginning and end of the story. It’s a fairly pointless exercise that adds nothing of substance to the narrative. Malkovich even literally says, “I have nothing more to say” at the end of the film. So the real story begins immediately afterward, with Marshall putting us right on the plane minutes before it crashes.
Society of the Snow has a more poetic framing device, but one that arguably makes even less sense. The story is narrated in voiceover by a character who actually dies two-thirds of the way through the picture (Enzo Vogrincic’s Numa Turcatti). As the film goes on it emphasizes a spiritual component via Numa’s ghostly sacrifice, but it doesn’t quite land. Society also begins on the ground, showing a few snippets of the team members and other passengers preparing to depart, before getting onto the plane as well.
From there, the major events of the story—the crash, the initial attempts to survive and ration out what little food they have, the missions to find the plane’s tail section and retrieve a radio battery, the decision to eat the dead, the terrifying avalanche that took the lives of nearly half the remaining survivors, and the final walk by Canessa and Nando Parrado—occur in both films in pretty much the exact same sequence. Some details are altered or compressed along the way, but the main narrative is the same.
An Adventure Story vs. A Gritty Tale of Survival
Frank Marshall has been primarily a producer for most of his career—as co-founder of Amblin Entertainment with his wife, Kathleen Kennedy, and Steven Spielberg, as well as through his and Kennedy’s own production company—and he has been behind some of the biggest hits of the past 50 years. He’s also directed four features (and a handful of documentaries), including Alive, and while his direction on this film is competent, it’s also fairly workmanlike.
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