First, a bit of background (if you’re unfamiliar with the story of the Andes crash, there may be a few spoilers here). I first read the definitive book on the subject, Alive, when it came out in 1974. I was transfixed by it, and agree with this assessment from The New Republic:

No one will come away unmoved by the book, and no one will be able to put it down. … There is no way of reading Alive without a heightened sense of one’s own life and its value.

The book is not only an extraordinary survival saga, but it has tremendously moving stories involving family, friendship, love, and sacrifice. It is a sort of reverse Lord of the Flies, where the cooperation among the survivors was extremely impressive, and it also contained deeply spiritual and religious elements despite its horrors.

Over the years I’ve read other books on the subject, including several written by the survivors. I’ve watched several documentaries as well. In 1993 an American movie came out on the subject, and although I was looking forward to it immensely I was sharply disappointed. It just didn’t ring true, plus it left out or truncated very important parts of the story, in particular involving the astounding trek by two of the young men who survived the initial crash.

So when I heard recently that there was a newer movie, made in 2023 in the Spanish language, and using previously-unknown Uruguayan and Argentinian actors, I was extremely eager to see it. I had to wait till I was in a certain mood, because the story is a grueling one even to watch, and from the trailer I could see it was very realistically as well as poetically done:

And so I watched the film, and I have mixed feelings about it. I would recommend it, although you need to be prepared for a harrowing journey. Compared to the previous movie it’s better. But compared to the book it simply doesn’t work for me. That surprised me, and I’ve been pondering why I found it ultimately very inferior to the book that some of the survivors thought was already inadequate.

For one thing, I think a book has the ability to give so much more background on the entire situation and the people in it, which deepens the story and its significance. Just to take one example, in the book you learn a great deal about a woman who was one of the initial survivors, Liliana Methol. But in the film she’s almost an afterthought and somewhat of a cipher. There just isn’t enough time to render each person in his or her fullness.

Plus, there are an enormous number of characters, and the actors (who look a great deal like the real life people they are representing) somewhat resemble each other, especially as the movie goes on and many become bearded and all become thinner (the actors were forced to lose weight as the film went on, for the sake of realism). It wasn’t that easy to tell them apart, and I knew a great deal about the characters already.

Films with big casts need to pay particular attention to this potential problem. I think that, for example, The Great Escape (a film favorite of mine although of a very different type), which also had a very big cast, dealt with the numbers more successfully because the protagonists were from different countries, and there were many stars in the cast and that helped the viewers remember who’s who. That movie was also about a half hour longer than Society of the Snow, and although both movies are long they both move along quite quickly because there’s so much to tell. But The Great Escape has more time in which to tell it.

In the book Alive, there’s a great deal of emphasis also on the stories of the families searching for their lost relatives; many did not give up hope, and their tales are especially moving and make the eventual reunions even more poignant and deeply felt. There was virtually none of that in the movie; you merely see reunions with parents and girlfriends which are generic because we don’t have much of the backstory.

There are many exchanges and scenes in the book that seem naturally cinematic, and some are left out of the movie. I don’t know why; it wouldn’t take much to have included them. Instead, there are repetitive scenes of the suffering endured by the survivors and their decline – as well as a tremendous emphasis on the most sensationalistic part of their story, the fact that in order to survive they very reluctantly decided they must eat the bodies of those who had died (and the living made a pact to allow the others to eat them if they died before rescue came), Any movie about this incident must deal with that fact, but I think that after a while this particular movie could have left out some of the redundancy and gone for some more of the background stories.

Most of all, I was surprised that the movie seemed to leave out or gloss over one of the most salient characteristics of the group, which is that they were Catholics and mostly believers, and that their specifically Catholic beliefs helped them endure. That is, many of them explicitly likened their eating the flesh of their dead companions to the Eucharist, although they were well aware of the differences. Instead, in the movie there was a vaguer spirituality that was emphasized. Even the part where, after the survivors returned to civilization and priests told them they would not be condemned by the Church for what they did in extremis – that entire aspect was left out. Instead, there was an almost-throwaway scene in a church at the beginning of the film, with a priest talking about the Host while some of the young men pass notes among them. Unless you already know the plot, you could easily miss its significance.

This omission and de-emphasis seems to me to be a deliberate lessening of the religious message and slant of the entire event, a trend toward the universal rather than the specific. But the specific can have a universal message, and I felt the omission keenly although I’m neither Catholic nor Christian.

The movie caused me to get out my old copy of Alive and start re-reading it. In the introduction, the author writes:

When I returned in October 1973 to show [the survivors] the manuscript of this book, some of them were disappointed by my presentation of their story. They felt that the faith and friendship which inspired them in the cordillera do not emerge from these pages. It was never my intention to underestimate these qualities, but perhaps it would be beyond the skill of any writer to express their own appreciation of what they lived through.

I think that’s an honest assessment; it’s an impossible task. Nevertheless I think that Piers Paul Read came as close to accomplishing it as anyone could. For me, he certainly came closer than any movie could.