Overall Rating
 Awesome: 34.72%
Worth A Look: 33.33%
Average: 23.61%
Pretty Bad: 5.56%
Total Crap: 2.78%
2 reviews, 60 user ratings
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| Alive (1993) |
by Scott Weinberg
"Waiter, there's a friend in my soup."
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Visually terrfiying and pretty bleak. Yes, it's a good movie, but it's also pretty darn depressing. Well made to be sure, but if plane crashes and cannibalism are your cup of tea, you have more important things to do than watch movies. Like group therapy.Frank Marshall gets let off Spielberg's leash and tries his hand at something a little darker. Seems this rugby team suffers a plane crash over the Andes, and we get to see the next 72 days of injuries, snow, body odor, fighting over food, more snow, freezing appendages, avalanches, no food, bad accents, deaths and ultimately....people eating.
Although written in a fairly pedestrain fashion, the movie does a good job of raising the "What would you do?" issues. Me, I'd be chomping blindly, hoping to ingest the dead first. (I would have loved to have seen a scene in which some of the rugby players smoked a joint, then one turns to the other and says "Damn, now I'm REALLY hungry!") The acting is almost uniformly neutral, with Vincent Spano standing out mainly because most of us have seen him in other things. Ethan Hawke acts as our moral center, being most open-minded by the ass-eating going on, then digging in (hey, we're talking 72 days, people) when the pizzas he orders never show up.
One suspects the film would have been vastly improved by two or three more trips to the editing room. The myriad slow spots are over-reliant on John Shanley's painfully trite dialogue...and I don't think we're supposed to be happy to see a massive avalanche squash eleven people just so we can have something interesting happen onscreen.
No review of Alive would be complete without a mention of the famous plane crash sequence. Still unsurpassed, this remains the single most terrifying depiction of a plane crash ever created. (Although the one in Peter Weir's Fearless is a close second.)
As Alive is based on a true story, I'm not spoiling anything when I tell you that some of them eventually get home. When the survivors are ultimately rescued, the joy we feel for them is countered by the knowledge that what they did will haunt them forever.
Disney pulls a sneaky movie by re-releasing this DVD as a "30th Anniversary" release. OK, so now we're releasing DVDs in commemoration of plane crashes? I suppose they need this swanky banner in order to repackage the previously bare-bones DVD with two documentaries and a handful of introductions by director Frank Marshall. The intros are banal and lifeless; they feel as if they were written on the spot. The two featurettes, "Alive: 20 Years Later" and "Return to the Andes", are worthwhile for fans of the film, though the former is actually a compelling look at the true story while the latter is rather pointless. Annoyingly, the original trailer is nowhere to be found; always an odd exclusion.It's an engrossing and thought-provoking movie, but not one for the easily-nauseated.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=776&reviewer=128
originally posted: 04/29/04 14:36:11
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USA
15-Jan-1993 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
02-Feb-1994 (MA)
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