Alive
Note: I was kind of reluctant to write about Alive. VHS of the Week is all about the jokery and there’s nothing funny about the events depicted in this film. Real people really died and others suffered horribly. I know for a fact that I have at least THREE regular readers in South America and would hate for one of the survivors to come across this review and have to listen to me make fun of their ordeal. That said--I DO think the fact that Disney took a look at the source material and thought that a schlocky action movie full of preppy caucasians was the right path to go down is ripe for some piss taking. So off we go!
Here are the actual facts of the case: in October of 1972 a chartered plane carrying an Uruguayan rugby team along with some of their friends, family members, and a few randos crashed into the Andes Mountains. 18 people either died on impact or shortly thereafter, leaving 27 dudes and one ladydude stranded at a suffocatingly high elevation where the dining options included snow, more snow, and other snow. A search and rescue mission was called off after 10 days, which sucks, and 8 more people perished when the plane’s battered fuselage was buried in an avalanche in the dead of night, which sucks harder. The remaining survivors eventually resorted to cannibalism in order to, you know, survive. Finally, after 60 some odd days, rugby studs Roberto Canessa and Nando Parrado decided it was time to hop on the good foot and do the bad thing. They filled their bellies with the choicest cuts of human flesh and, without the aid of any real hiking knowhow or gear, climbed out of the Andes. On day 72 they were finally spotted by a Chilean muleskinner, who alerted the authorities. The remaining 14 passengers were rescued by helicopter the following day. Cool story, huh!? I’ve always thought so! I read Alive, Piers Paul Ried’s 1974 account of the tragedy back in high school. In 2007 I went to NYC to catch the premiere of Stranded: I’ve Come from a Plane that Crashed on the Mountains, an indispensable documentary narrated by almost all of the survivors that should really be the last word on the subject. Hell, I even own a copy of Nando Parrado’s autobiography Miracle in the Andes, where he spends an inordinate amount of time talking about getting laid (not on the mountain, of course).
In the early 90’s, Disney optioned Reid’s novel and decided to Hollywood the shit out of it. Alive was released in January of 1993 and the trailer for the film was shown incessantly throughout the holiday film season. I don’t feel like conducting any actual research on this because accuracy ain’t my jam….but I feel like they really played up the cannibalism angle in the promotional materials. It was like “It’s the Donner Party with wings! It’s Die Hard on a mountain but with 16 John McClane’s and the mountain is the villain!!” All I can tell you is that 14 year-old me quickly became OBSESSED. I knew I had to see this flick the very second it landed in theaters or I would lose my goddamn fucking mind. I even went to see the fleetingly watchable Eddie Murphy comedy The Distinguished Gentleman three times because I knew they were going to run the trailer for Alive before it (don’t worry...I bailed halfway though to go watch Hoffa...which I bailed on that to go watch Toys...before just up and bailing altogether). When opening day rolled around I dispatched my unfailingly accommodating mother to buy my buddies and I tickets for the 7:30 showing of Alive while I was still at school. I should’ve just stayed home from school ‘cuz I was completely useless that day. I could do only two things: daydream about Alive and drool on myself. The math teacher was all like “Mr Tebo--what’s the square root of 64?” and I was all like “umm...cannibalistic rugby player?” So we get to the theater and we’re standing in line to purchase our concessions when my pal Howard notices that a gaggle of girls from our freshman class have entered the lobby. He suggests we go say hello, even though they sit atop the social pyramid and I stay at home making scrapbooks full of Freddy Krueger pictures and kill stats. They ask us what movie we are seeing. “Alive” Howard tells them dismissively. “It’s about people eating PEOPLE!” I tell them, less dismissively. “Ew gross!” one of them squeals, “you guys should come see Aladdin with us instead!” You know--I totally understand my friend’s reaction. These were the girls who wouldn’t let us sit at their lunch table even if we showed up with a four pack of strawberry wine coolers. And now they were inviting us to watch a movie with them?? NEXT TO THEM!? In a darkened theater!? Quite the coup right there. Me? I couldn’t have given a shit less. “Umm...I’m what they call a cinephile--I don’t watch cartoons...come on fellas, let’s go.” And what did my friends do? Disappeared into Aladdin with the ladies and left me standing alone in the lobby clutching my Milk Duds. I simply said “their loss” and headed off to take in Alive solo. Just kidding! I friggin’ spazzed out. Had a full on meltdown and lost control of all of my faculties! I marched into Aladdin and started to berate my friends. “We had a plan….a VOW! And y’all broke the vow!!!” “Tebo--if you really want to see Alive so bad...GO SEE IT,” Howard said. I told my friends that I would report them to the ushers….that I would never speak to them again...that I would spend the rest of my life holed up in my basement burning effigies of the both of them.” I was apoplectic. One wall away a plane was about to make contact with an Ande and we were going to miss it. Finally my other pal Brett said “man, we can’t watch you crying and pissing yourself in front of the ladies for much longer….let’s just go see the other thing.” We snuck into Alive just as the Fairchild started to fall from the sky. We watched all two hours and four minutes of Alive and...you know...it just wasn’t very good. Had I known then what I know now I would've watched the crash scene and said “I bet there will be a documentary that does a much better job of telling this story that will come out 15 years from now so let’s go see what the ladies are up to.” Dudes...if you’re reading...I’m wicked sorry! Cool story, huh? This time...not so much.
Anyway, what happens is this: Alive opens with an aggressively uncredited John Malkovich sitting in front of a slide projector, ripping butts and bloviating his ass off. I guess he’s one of the survivors looking back at old photos 20 years later or whatever. Alive’s screenplay was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright John Patrick Shanley, who also directed severely underrated Joe Vs the Volcano as well as the accurately rated Moonstruck. Right away he lays on the pretense with the thickness. “We were affronted by solitude without decadence. There’s God and then there’s the God I met on the mountain.” Yeah. maybe dial it down about a million percent! Here I should mention that, when John Malkovich moved to Cambridge in the early 00’s, his publicist told the local newspapers that he was furiously private and should not be approached in public or at restaurants under any circumstances. A few months later I saw Malkovich walking into a Red Sox game wearing pink capri pants, ballet slippers, and an oversized white cashmere scarf, all but guaranteeing people would walk up to him and ask if he was the dude from Being John Malkovich. Maybe try a Nomar jersey and a pair of Ray Ban’s if you want to blend in with the Fenway Faithful, bro.
CUT TO: 13 October 1972--an aeroplane flying high above the Andes. The passengers, South American all, are almost exclusively portrayed by gringo actors. A couple of them speak English but with a slight accent, like they are showing off while ordering at a tapas restaurant: “yes, I’ll have the tortilla espanola” (rolls the R hard). White Fang star Ethan Hawke plays Nando Parrado, traveling with his mother and younger sister Suzy. And then there’s pre-med student Roberto Canessa, played by Josh Hamilton, looking less like a rugby player and more like a dude who got lost on the way to the set of the latest Noah Baumbach flick. The plane hits turbulence but the passengers whoop and shout Ole because they are young, dumb, and full of scrum. The pilots get on the PA and tell everyone to settle down and that they’ll be on the ground in a few minutes. Dude, yeah you will! I don’t trust these pilots one shit, man. They force the flight attendant to make them Yerba Mate...just to throw some weight around. Speaking of weight--the pilots quickly realize that they began their descent prematurely and are about to hit the slopes. They throttle up the engines but that big bastard is just too heavy. They come THISCLOSE to clearing the peaks...but yeah...not good. The rear of the plane kisses the edge of a cliff, shearing off the tail and both of the wings. How does a plane without a tail or wings continue to fly? Shittily. I gotta say--this plane crash scene still packs the same visceral punch that it did almost 30 years ago. There’s a moment, after the violence of the collision, where the fuselage is hurtling through the air and everyone on board is silent and the only sound you hear is the wind rushing through the cabin that is one of the more harrowing moments captured on film. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from there...for the plane and for this movie. The fuselage belly flops onto the mountain and toboggans down the hill in a death sprint before crashing into a snow bank at 200 MPH. The force of the crash tears the seats from the floor of the plane and throws them toward the cockpit wall, pancaking all of the passengers. Injuries range from completely unhurt to sudden death. One lady’s legs are broken and trapped under the seats. Another dude had his leg mostly severed when the propeller cartwheeled through the cabin. Among the less injured are Canessa as well as team captain Marcelo Perez, played by man who was in every other movie in the 80’s and then nothing ever again Vincent Spano. And look! There’s that actor Jack Noseworthy! Remember in the early 90’s when he was hot property and starred in a Bon Jovi video and an MTV original show called Dead at 21? Neither do I. Canessa assesses the situation and gives his prognosis: no bueno. They check Ethan Hawke’s vitals and Canessa shakes his head and says “I don’t think so.” Umm...he’s...like...way more famous than everyone else in this movie. Maybe check again!?? They check on the pilot, who is still alive but whose body has fused with the plane’s instrument panel. He asks the fellas to bring him a pistol so he can take care of what needs to be taken care of. They tell him they can’t be involved in that sort of thing. So enjoy your slow, terrible death, Capitan!
Once darkness falls, the survivors try to catch some Z’s in the mangled fuselage, which proves nearly impossible as it is no shit 50 below zero and almost everyone boarded the plane wearing mesh tank tops and Tevas. The lady with the busted legs wails through the night, causing one of the kids to call her a stupid cow and threaten to kill her. It’s cool though—she doesn’t live through the night. The kid says he’s so ashamed but doesn’t really sell it. The more anonymous members of the cast have an acting skill set more suitable to, say, a porno flick. The dudes conduct a little inventory and discover that they have one Toblerone, a case of Chilean Syrah, and 16 saltines....for 27 people. Good thing the crash didn’t happen post 9/11 or they wouldn’t have had fuck all to eat on board! You know—back when I got a body cavity search at LAX because I forgot I had a 2 oz tube of eczema lotion in my carry on. Anyway, they figure that’s more than enough to nosh on while they wait for the rescue wagon...which should be arriving with the quickness. Someone suggests that Ethan Hawke might just be able to rouse himself to carry the movie after all. Canessa brings him a cap full of Syrah...’cuz those tannins really help reactivate your palate after you’ve been in a coma. He’s like “dude, where are we?” and they’re like “I’m afraid we have some bad news...and well...also some worse news.” His mother is dead and his sister is bleeding internally and they can’t really perform surgery with just a first aid kit. She dies too. It’s really sad. While Canessa is inside triaging, a plane flies overhead and appears to dip its wings. Folks assume they’ve been spotted and that their grizzly mountainside sojourn has come to an end. They crush all of the crackers and vino in one fell swoop. When Vincent Spano finds out he loses his shit and screams “you are playing with our lives!!!” For months after we saw this movie, Howard and Brett screamed “you are playing with our lives!” at me every time they passed me in the hall. When Hawke/Nando finally emerges from the plane and is told there’s no food left he doesn’t miss a beat: “Well then we’ll eat the pilots. They got us into this frosty pickle!” According to Parrado’s book, they tried to eat glaringly non-edible parts of the plane, like the seats. THE SEATS!!! (“When there was no crawdad to be found we ate sand. You ate SAND??”—Raising Arizona). Some of the dudes try to hike to the tail to find batteries to power up the plane’s radio...but it’s hella hard when you're subsisting on a daily ration of one sip of vino and sun dried shoelaces.
After 10 days on the mountain word comes across this wire that the search and rescue mission has been called off. Nando gathers everyone together and tells them that this is “great news.” That now they can officially get busy living or get busy dying. Or get busy dying to live? Or live trying to die? I forget what he actually said and didn’t write it down. You get the gist though, right? Here I should mention that Ethan Hawke is starting to look dead....SEXY! He has started to grow a goddamn goatee. A finely etched goatee. Did he go to the producers and say “look, I gotta play a grungy heartthrob in Reality Bites after I leave here...so can we make me look less like a malnourished castaway and more like Chris Cornell circa Superunknown? Thanks!” The rest of the survivors seem to grow more handsome the longer they’re on the mountain too. It’s an entire plane full of Gabriel Garcia Bernal’s! Nando eventually tells the gang that they’re gonna have to eat the bodies of their dead friends ....and everyone freaks the fuck out. “We can’t eat people...they’re people!” (People are People—Depeche Mode). Nando lays down some trip about how Jesus offered his flesh as a sacrifice and that their fellow passengers are essentially doing the same thing. Most of them are like “mmm yeah—I guess that tracks. Where the utensils at?” The next morning they wake up ready to chow face. Literally. I want to say this film avoids sensationalizing cannibalism...and it does....but it also doesn’t? I guess it’s handled as tastefully as possible (I know—there’s a million cheap jokes floating around in my head too). Canessa grabs one of the bodies, slices a hunk of flesh from the ass area, and chokes it down. How does it taste? Like ass! (Iiiiii know! I’m sorry!!). They figure now that they’re satiated they’ll have enough energy to go look for those tail batteries again.
One night as the gang is bedding down in their makeshift one-star Air Bn’B, the plane’s lone surviving lady passenger Lilliana (the always incredible Ileana Douglas), tells her husband that she’d like to have more children if she ever gets off the mountain....which is screenwriting code for “this character will die in the very next scene.” Sure enough, later that night the plane was buried by an avalanche. Wounds—meet salt. Ileana Douglas dies along with 7 other passengers including Vinny Spano, who hasn’t really done much but sulk around in the background ever since Ethan Hawke woke up. This flick treats the avalanche like a fatal yet minor hiccup. In actuality, folks were trapped in the snow packed fuselage for DAYS! So long, in fact, that they had to eat the newly dead that they were stuck on top of. They also smoked a shit ton of cigarettes in there with little ventilation. Honestly, I’m not sure what grosses me out more. Maybe the smoking?
The survivors emerge from the avalanche with a newfound resolve to get themselves off the mountain. I mean...kinda. Another month goes by and they don’t really do much of anything. What are you really gonna do marooned way up in the Andes in 1972? Post TikToks? Nando leads a crew up to the tail where they find some toothpaste to eat, which is awesome. They also discover the long sought after batteries are useless, which is less awesome. They finally figure the only way they’ll get off the mountain alive is to to hike off. So...you know...that’s what they do! And this is where things really go sideways for this flick. The final 30 minutes play out like an utterly suspenseless meat and potatoes action flick with a preordained outcome. Even if you somehow went into this movie completely ignorant of the true story that it’s based on, you must know that some of them survive as one of the survivors narrates the beginning of the movie. Also—it’s called Alive ....not fuckin’ DEAD. The rugby kids were all intelligent and spiritual and have had really amazing insights into their ordeal throughout their lives. I’m gonna guess that there was a draft of the Shanley screenplay that read like a Samuel Beckett play and that the producers tossed it out decided to film like 15 different sequences where a dude almost falls off a cliff and has to be rescued by another dude (actually this only happens like 3 times...but it’s shit annoying. We already know that no one fell off a cliff!). After 10 days and like a million movie minutes of hiking, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa finally spot a dude on a donkey. They lead a fleet of helicopters back to the wreckage and rescue their buddies. Cue Aaron Neville singing Ave Maia, roll credits, and call that shit a WRAP! No mention of how people reacted when they learned the dudes survived by eating other dudes (answer: poorly at first...but they explained it away pretty well...and South Americans aren’t fucking idiots about stuff like Americans are). Everyone who lived lived happily ever after. Especially Nando Parrado...who was palling around with Jackie Stewart and judging bikini contests by the end of 1972. As of this writing I have still yet to watch the 1992 version of Disney's Aladdin. The end.