On Friday, the 13th of October, 1972, a charter plane carrying 45 passengers, including a college rugby team, vanished over the desolate, snow-covered Andes Mountains. For 72 days, the world thought they were dead.
Director:
Brad Osborne
Stars:
James Lentzsch,
Benjamin Josse,
Kelly Haitz
An intellectual billionaire and two lesser men struggle to band together and survive after getting stranded in the Alaskan wilderness with a blood-thirsty Kodiak Bear hunting them down.
Director:
Lee Tamahori
Stars:
Anthony Hopkins,
Alec Baldwin,
Elle Macpherson
Jack London's classic adventure story about the friendship developed between a Yukon gold hunter and the mixed dog-wolf he rescues from the hands of a man who mistreats him.
Based on a true story, North Face is a survival drama film about a competition to climb the most dangerous rock face in the Alps. Set in 1936, as Nazi propaganda urges the nation's ... See full summary »
Director:
Philipp Stölzl
Stars:
Benno Fürmann,
Florian Lukas,
Johanna Wokalek
On New Year's Eve, the luxury ocean liner Poseidon capsizes after being swamped by a rogue wave. The survivors are left to fight for their lives as they attempt to escape the sinking ship.
Director:
Wolfgang Petersen
Stars:
Richard Dreyfuss,
Kurt Russell,
Emmy Rossum
When noted anthropologist Dr. Ethan Powell, who left society to live in the jungle is imprisoned for murder, it's up to young psychiatrist Theo Caulder to get through to him.
Director:
Jon Turteltaub
Stars:
Anthony Hopkins,
Cuba Gooding Jr.,
Donald Sutherland
In 1972, the Uruguayan rugby team is flying to Chile to play a game. However, the plane from the Uruguayan Air Force with 45 people crashes on the Andes Mountains and after the search party, they are considered dead. Two months after the crash, the sixteen survivors are finally rescued. Along the days, the starved survivors decide to eat flesh from the bodies of their comrades to survive.Written by
Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The film's main location was the ski town of Panorama in the Canadian Rockies. To get all 150 cast and crew members to the location every morning took a fleet of five helicopters. See more »
Goofs
After the plane tail is gone, there are reflections of a studio light in a boy's glasses who sits in the last row. The sky is overcast so it couldn't be sunlight. See more »
Quotes
Carlitos Páez:
[Nando, Canessa and Tintin are about to leave]
Wait!
Hugo Díaz:
Carlitos, let them go!
Carlitos Páez:
I have to tell you something. I had a dream last night, a tremendous premonition. I saw green fields and flowers. I could smell the grass.
[pause]
Carlitos Páez:
Your expedition will succeed.
See more »
Critics often fault Alive with petty complaints: Gee, wasn't the avalanche a convenient plot device? Why didn't the plane have signal flares? How come the survivors were all those pretty boys? Why don't we see the dramatic search? In doing so, they're faulting reality: The avalanche really did happen when and how it was portrayed. The wreckage really did lack signal flares. The plane really was chartered by a bunch of ruggedly handsome young men -- what else do you expect from a rugby team? And yes, the search was dramatic (the moment when Roberta Cannessa's father learned that his son is alive is one of those stranger-than-fiction moments), but it was enough of a task to compress the survivors' story into a feature film. The search would have comprised another film entirely on its own.
How do you compress nearly three months of terror and tedium into less than two hours while still holding the attention of the audience? It's a daunting task, and Alive manages quite nicely. With technical consulting provided by crash survivor Nando Parrado, Alive captures the look and mood of the crash site, and sketches in the relationships among the passengers of the ill-fated flight.
It leaves many strange questions hanging (Where, in this plane full of mostly unmarried adults, does Nando come up with two tiny red sneakers?) and those questions are best answered by reading the book. And watch Alive again. Things become clearer with multiple viewings.
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Critics often fault Alive with petty complaints: Gee, wasn't the avalanche a convenient plot device? Why didn't the plane have signal flares? How come the survivors were all those pretty boys? Why don't we see the dramatic search? In doing so, they're faulting reality: The avalanche really did happen when and how it was portrayed. The wreckage really did lack signal flares. The plane really was chartered by a bunch of ruggedly handsome young men -- what else do you expect from a rugby team? And yes, the search was dramatic (the moment when Roberta Cannessa's father learned that his son is alive is one of those stranger-than-fiction moments), but it was enough of a task to compress the survivors' story into a feature film. The search would have comprised another film entirely on its own.
How do you compress nearly three months of terror and tedium into less than two hours while still holding the attention of the audience? It's a daunting task, and Alive manages quite nicely. With technical consulting provided by crash survivor Nando Parrado, Alive captures the look and mood of the crash site, and sketches in the relationships among the passengers of the ill-fated flight.
It leaves many strange questions hanging (Where, in this plane full of mostly unmarried adults, does Nando come up with two tiny red sneakers?) and those questions are best answered by reading the book. And watch Alive again. Things become clearer with multiple viewings.