"After 20 years, you analyze a lot. You remember people, heroism. The Miracle of the Andes ... that's what they call it. Many people come up to me and say that, had they been there, they surely would have died — but that makes no sense because, until you are in a situation like that, you have no idea how you'll behave. To be affronted by solitude without decadence or a single material thing to prostitute — that elevates you to a spiritual plane ... where I felt the presence of God. Now there's the God they taught me about at school — and there's the God that's hidden by what surrounds us in this civilization. That's the God that I met on the mountain."
Older Carlitos/Narrator (John Malkovich)
I think I was in junior high when I read Piers Paul Read's book "Alive" — which was about a Uruguayan rugby team that was involved in an airplane crash in the Andes Mountains in October 1972.
I was mesmerized by the story. The survivors of the crash ultimately had to consume the bodies of their deceased companions like a modern–day Donner Party. They were rescued after spending more than 10 weeks on the mountain.
Like so many others I fixated on that one part of the story when there were so many more uplifting aspects of the story. Fortunately, the movie version, which premiered on this day in 1993, touched on many of them.
It all came back to the power of the will to survive. Human history is loaded with stories of people who probably shouldn't have survived something but did, almost entirely because they decided they simply were not going to die. It wasn't their time yet.
In such a story, there must be some precipitous event that serves as the catalyst for everything that is to come. In this case it was the plane crash, as realistic in its depiction in "Alive" as Spielberg's depiction of the D–Day invasion in "Saving Private Ryan." I was astonished that the re–creation of the crash was not nominated for an Oscar.
("Alive" director Frank Marshall co–founded Amblin Entertainment with Spielberg. Clearly he learned a few things from that affiliation.)
The plane crash took comparatively little time to depict. So did the part about eating the bodies of the dead. The rest of the movie was about the effort to survive, which was much more than the act of eating human flesh.
It was about overcoming the obstacles that were thrown at the survivors. Those obstacles sometimes seemed to be Hollywood creations — like the avalanche of snow that buried the plane in which the survivors sought shelter — but everything in the movie was absolutely true.
Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.
And that, it seemed to me, was the message of the movie.
Not the sensational accounts of having to eat human flesh. True, that was part of the story, but it only took about a dozen minutes of a movie that was more than two hours long. It represented a fraction of the story — and I will readily admit that part of the story is repugnant.
But it wasn't the whole story. Far from it.
Because the movie was a true story (several of the survivors served as technical advisers to the movie production crew), the audience could follow and sympathize with the survivors' predicament and the stages they went through in fully accepting what they had to do, whether they were prepared for it or not.
The survivors of the crash had no training for surviving in a harsh environment. Yes, they were athletic, but in rugby you run a lot. You don't have to wage a life–and–death struggle every day in extreme conditions with limited rations.
Much like the movie "Miracle," "Alive" had little in the name of A–list stars. And that was a good thing. I don't think either movie would have been as effective with all–star casts. They would have been too distracting from the critical choices that the characters had to make — one of which was whether to consume the flesh of their deceased friends and relatives.
True, Ethan Hawke was in the movie, but his was not quite a household name yet. He had been in "Dead Poets Society" with Robin Williams a few years earlier, but he was still nearly a decade away from his first Academy Award nomination.
And John Malkovich was in the movie as well, but he was merely a narrator, an older version of one of the crash survivors. He wasn't even mentioned in the credits.
But back to the story. There were other obstacles to overcome — for example the mental adjustment that had to be made when the survivors learned the search party they were so sure would find them had been called off. That was a considerable hurdle as well.
And at a certain point they had to accept the fact that, if they were going to be saved, they would have to do it themselves. Some of the survivors would have to try to hike down the mountain to find help.
Those who focused on the cannibalism are as short–sighted as the congressman I once heard criticizing the nudity in "Schindler's List."
"Alive" was about faith and hope — and the determination to survive. And it was a reminder of the old biblical admonition to "judge not lest ye be judged." However much we may think we know how we would act under such circumstances, as Malkovich's character said in the opening narration, "until you are in a situation like that, you have no idea how you'll behave."
It is wrong to judge people who must make those kinds of choices. Frankly, it is wrong to judge anyone for most behavior that is not criminal — especially if the full story is not known. The full story of what happened on the Andes Mountains in 1972 can only be known by those who lived through it.
And that was what the movie was all about.
