Frank Marshall's film "Alive" has never exactly been a classic, but for a certain group of moviegoers who saw it in 1993, it remains a vivid memory. A heart-in-mouth reenactment of the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in 1972, of which 16 people ultimately survived 72 days stranded in a remote, snowy stretch of the Andes in western Argentina, while 29 perished, he visualized the events beyond the mandate. of news and stories from magazines around the world. For those of us too young to remember it, it became our first point of contact with the saga, triggering countless aerophobic nightmares and discussions of "what would you do?" in relation to its most gruesome details.
“Alive” was well-made enough and well-acted enough to endure, but it never seemed ideal that actors as posh and all-American as Ethan Hawke and Josh Hamilton, speaking in Yankee-accented English, would become the faces of this film. South American history in the popular imagination. That's a solid reason for J.A. Bayona retells the story, with a starless, all-Spanish-speaking cast, in her muscular and effective tearjerker “The Snow Society,” which grips her with alternating waves of fear, horror and moving relief, even when barely can do it. surprise. The source is different this time: Uruguayan journalist Pablo Vierci's 2009 book of the same title, which was written in collaboration with multiple survivors of the accident and, using their most intimately detailed first-hand accounts, attempts to give perspective to both the living and the dead.
Director: J.A. Bayona
Writers: J.A. Bayona, Nicolás Casariego, Jaime Marques
Stars: Enzo Vogrincic, Rafael Federman, Matías Recalt
Bayona's film attempts the same deceptive maneuver, unexpectedly taking as protagonist and narrator not one of the most prominent survivors of the disaster, but a noble victim: Numa Turcatti (Uruguayan actor Enzo Vogrincic), a 24-year-old law student. which acts as a type of moral conscience for the collective, both before and beyond the grave. Some viewers may question the wisdom of speculatively writing a dead man's final testimony: “Today, my voice carries his words,” Numa says off-screen, claiming to speak for all the souls who left or remained on the mountain, but those who allow it That dramatic license in “The Snow Society” may well be due to its nuanced, non-denominational spiritualism, which further distinguishes it from the more simply inspiring brief adventure of the previous film.
Which is not to say that Bayona skimps on the action element: as expected from the Spanish director of the 2012 Indian Ocean tsunami drama, “The Impossible,” he once again achieves a tremendously visceral reconstruction of a catastrophe of the real life, hitting the audience with formal pyrotechnics for a throat-grabbing "you're there" effect, before shifting focus to the devastated personal crisis of it all. Joining that special subset of films that will under no circumstances appear on the in-flight entertainment menu, “The Snow Society” spends minimal time on basic character introduction pleasantries before launching into one of the most horribly believable ever seen. Captured on screen: The charter plane carrying members of the local Old Christians Club rugby team, plus several friends, family and associates, leaves Montevideo and soon, due to pilot error, begins a fatally premature descent.
Advanced digital effects and rapid editing by Jaume Martí and Andrés Gil go into overdrive as the plane crashes into the mountain, breaking into pieces as it falls and slides down a glacier, with seats and bodies piling forward like dominoes. . Building on the relatively anonymous genre moves of 2018's “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” Bayona once again proves that he is an expert orchestrator of large, tactile pieces.
But while the film was brilliantly shot on location in the Andes and Spain's Sierra Nevada region (with cinematographer Pedro Luque Briozzo Scu rendering snow and skin alike in varying shades of polar blue, relative to the searing white of the winter sun), the remaining two hours rest more on Bayona's aptitude for broadly emotive human storytelling, propelled by a typically maximalist score by Michael Giacchino that throws frenetic percussion and a rousing chorus alongside sweeping strings.
Watch Society of the Snow 2023 Movie Trailer
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