Society of the Snow

A decent premise with a passable execution. The film seems like it portrays events relatively faithfully but in doing so perhaps neglects narrative drive or meaningful plot development. I think the film would have been a lot tighter if 15-25 minutes of waiting in the snow was skipped over more briefly. The length of time they were trapped was of course a huge part of their miraculous story but i don't think the film did a great job of portraying that on screen. I kept wondering "why doesn't someone go seeking help when they know no one is looking for them?" and i don't think the film adequately addressed that question either in action or dialogue. Character development was negligible with the film noticeably dragging through the middle portion without a compelling reason. Not a film i'll likely remember nor one i'd recommend seeing.

If you're at all familiar with Ethan Hawke's "Alive" (1993) then you'll have the gist of this story of the Uruguayan rugby team whose aircraft came down after heavy turbulence, stranding them amidst the wreckage high up in the Andes mountains. Of the forty who embarked, only sixteen remain and it now falls to them to demonstrate the ultimate in team spirit if they are to fight the cold, hunger, fear, avalanches and each other to survive. Juan Bayona has created a really uncomfortable film to watch here, engendering some strong performances from Enzo Vogrincic (Turcatti) and Agustín Pardella (Nando) as they are forced to drink melted snow and - well you can use your imagination as to how they had to find enough food to survive the sub-zero temperatures whilst - they hoped - help would find them. It's the pristine cinematography that helps this stand out - we really do get a sense of the hostility of this terrain, the cold and the dark; the cloud line making an airborne search for them all but impossible. Should some of them set off to search lower down or is their greater safety in numbers? It's history, so we do know what happened back in 1972 - but even that doesn't impact too much on the gradually increasing senses of peril, claustrophobia and terror and of the best and worst aspects of human nature when facing a crisis. An ensemble effort really, with a team of actors presenting a convincing and compellingly chilling tale of survival that's well crafted by those behind the camera too.

Pretty realistic movie of the events of the tragedy of the uruguayan flight with the that crashed in the Andes in 72, showing the strive for survival and realistic events that occurred (including the cannibalism as last resort for survival when the searches were stopped). The film closed the 80th Venice International Film Festival, and was selected as the Spanish entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards. The flight was carrying 45 passengers and crew, including 19 members of the Old Christians Club rugby union team, along with their families, supporters and friends. Out of the initial crash, 33 people survived but with natural exposure, starvation, infection and other causes the final number was 16. This because, two survivors, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, climbed the 4,650-metre (15,260 ft) mountain peak on the western rim of the glacier cirque without any mountaineering gear whatsoever and hiked for 10 days into Chile to seek help, traveling 61 km (38 miles) to find a rescue team by helicopters. On 23 December 1972, two months after the crash, all 16 remaining survivors were rescued. The news of their miraculous survival drew worldwide headlines and evolved into a media circus about the fact of cannibalism. The director J. A. Bayona (The Orphanage, The Impossible, A Monster Calls, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), discovered the book of one of the survivors while researching material for the Impossible and bought the rights for the book when he finished filming that movie, while taking more than 100h of interviews with the survivors, and was shoot in location around the crash site and into the actual crash site coasting mor than 60 million Euros. The cinematography by Pedro Luque (Antbellum, Don't Breathe , Blue Beetle, The Girl into the Spider Web) is pretty gritty and realistic, and prosthetics by David Martí and Montse Ribé, Academy Award–winning special effects makeup artists of Pan's Labyrinth were used. In general the best of the movie depicting the events, in a more than realistic way than Alive. Score: 8.1 out of 10.0 / A-