Rizvi Risath – Google

The nightmarish details of Uruguayan air force flight 571 have been recounted numerous times through cinema and documentary - most notably by Frank Marshall in his 1993 box-office hit ‘Alive’. Now, the modern master of disaster J.A Bayona takes a stab at telling the story in its native tongue with the evocatively named ‘Society of the Snow’, an ambitious if overlong survival epic that may not rank amongst the directors’ very best works but nonetheless carries his trademark of balancing extraordinary spectacle with character and raw emotion. Adapted from Pablo Vierci’s 2009 book of the same name and made in direct collaboration with several survivors of the tragedy, this sometimes overwhelming movie recounts the saga of the 1972 catastrophe which saw a chartered plane filled with young rugby players crash without trace in the frozen wastes of the Andes mountains, forcing its remaining passengers to, among many things, resort to the horrors of cannibalism in order to make it through the 72 day ordeal. Whether it be the Boxing Day tsunami of ‘The Impossible’ (2011) or the palpable terror of losing a family member to illness as seen in the devastating ‘A Monster Calls’ (2017), J.A Bayona has always displayed a talent for bringing a very real sense of humanity to disaster and ‘Society of the Snow’ is no different. Yes, it has plenty of moments of breathtaking and heart-stopping destruction, all of which are executed with highly convincing and frequently terrifying CGI and practical effects - the plane crash itself is a genuinely terrifying sequence which will send the mildest of aviophobes reaching for the nearest cushion to hide behind - while the expansive vistas of the Andean summits are as deathly ominous as they are breathtakingly beautiful. But anchoring the unimaginable chaos is the strength of the performances from the unknown South American cast (Adam Driver lookalike Enzo Vogrincic is particularly good here as the doomed narrator of the story) as well as the profundity of the script which goes far beyond the physical to delve into deeper themes of spirituality and sacrifice. Equal parts nerve-shredding thriller and life-affirming drama, ‘Society of the Snow’ is an imperfect but nonetheless movingly effective study of self-preservation and kinship against the odds that manages to tell its icily agoraphobic story without having to rely on gruesome sensationalism or melodramatic contrivance. 99 people found this helpful.