Review of Alive

Alive (1993)
6/10
Casual Cannibalism
13 February 2016
Warning: Spoilers
Alive is an immensely horrific true story that had the potential to become an amazing film. This film is not that amazing film. It does alright, its good but could have been told in a different, and in my opinion, a much better way.

The acting was a balance, it was good at times but terrible at other points, lines were delivered rather unenthusiastically or annoyingly overly dramatic by many, but there is also some good acting thrown in, most notably from Ethan Hawke who luckily becomes stronger and more involved as the film proceeds.

The way in which the cannibalism issue was handled was impressive, and I would suspect was also realistic. The first time is obviously the worst, morals are questioned as the team make what is a very, very difficult choice to make that was conveyed extremely well in this film. But after the first time it becomes much easier and even casual to some characters which I would believe to be true.

My problem with this film was it's tone. The story is about a group of friends and relatives whose plane crashes, killing some while the extreme weather conditions of the Andes slowly kills the others, and how the survivors had to resort to eating their loved ones to stay alive. This is a very dark, disturbing and traumatic true event and I was hoping would spawn a similarly gritty drama that I feel would have more accurately reflected the experience of the rugby team. I found this film to contain a large amount of 90's cheese and to find Disney in the credits probably explains that. The tone and story didn't go together at all, the cheesy film of a nightmarish event is the on screen equivalent of mixing oil with water in my opinion.

Overall Alive is an alright film, it tells the story quite well it just has the wrong tone and feel for the most part. I would be very interested to see this film remade, as it is a tremendous event and I believe given a much darker tone, could give life to the film that I believe this true story deserves.
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