PicoBlog

Back in the ‘90s, the Hollywood movie “Alive” became known for primarily one thing: the featured characters, stranded in a wrecked plane in the Andes, had to eat dead bodies to survive.

Every time I hear that movie referenced, that’s all that’s said about the story and the art that depicts it.

“Society of the Snow,” from Spanish director J.A. Bayona, tries to change that reductive view. He’s created a memorial of a movie that honors the survivors and the dead, while retelling a absolutely harrowing story of survival, one of the world’s greatest and most disturbing that I know of.

You probably are familiar with that story. In 1972, a Uruguayan rugby team flies to Chile on a plane through the Andes. The plane crashes. Most of them survive, but they have virtually nothing to keep them alive — including nothing to start a fire with, almost no food, and a barren wasteland of a landscape that has nothing but snow and mountains. They aren’t found by rescue planes.

We know some of them survived, and this movie tries to realistically depict, even recreate, their feeble lives in the snow-covered Andes. The survivors spent 72 days there, unbelievably, as this movie made me feel to the core of my gut.

It’s instructive to see how “Society of the Snow” proceeds in a wholly different way that Hollywood has and would’ve. First, it doesn’t differentiate the men visually at all (and the one woman who survived the crash but not the entire saga). It also doesn’t give any of them an obvious character type, such as the selfish individualist, the ardent atheist, the pragmatic scientist, the optimistic gregarious one who later becomes the ultimate pessimist, and so on.

So for a long while, I couldn’t tell the men apart. This is by design. The title gives the idea away: a society in the snow. These men are a group, and the film shows their cooperation, a sign of — I assume — a subtle ideological agenda, which is intra-national cooperation between South American nations, maybe even all people.

The crash takes them all by surprise. The film’s opening quickly moves into the crash, showing only that these boys, prior to the flight, are athletic rugby players, and that their typical hopes are in meeting pretty girls in Chile.

That transition from pre-crash to crash is instantaneous, and it has a visceral movie-punch. The story turns into a Crusoenade quickly — the survivors have to assess what they’ve got and where they are. But quickly, too, that becomes futile. They have nearly nothing. They are also in the middle of absolutely nowhere, impossible to see from the sky.

If you want a philosophical view of their predicament, they are blips of nothing that are seemingly meaningless.

Here the film has an interesting psycho-religious battle, between the visuals and the attitudes of some of the men as Herzogian, versus the Catholic believers who survived. I say “Herzogian” alluding to the great director and artist Werner Herzog, a teller of tales of sublime darkness, or dark sublimity, like this one. He loves to discuss apparent meaningless combined with natural beauty, the place the men seem sentenced to death in.

Yet the chief Catholic believer — the one major character type depicted here — is Numa, a character who refuses to eat the dead. He lines up typologically with Christ, who wandered into the wilderness for 40 days for his trial, with no food or drink. That’s the one story we hear about before the crash, Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, when a few of the boys attend a Catholic mass. They too will be forced to wander in an impossible desert wasteland.

The movie sets itself up as a trial of faith. Faith in what? The voiceover tells us, the audience, that we are supposed to supply the meaning. Maybe it’s nothing, or else something more.

Yet I think director Barona is pretty Christian. He repeatedly includes near-death and pseudo-resurrection scenes, as when an avalanche hits the plane and the screen goes black. The next shot is of a character gasping for air, sunlight on his face, having survived the impossible. This cut-to-black/character-breathes sequence must have been repeated six times. We get death-and-resurrection so often that, of course, we might see “Society of the Snow” as a type of salvation of some kind.

That brings me to the cannibalism.

Pardon the pun, but it is tastefully done, not sensationalized. The only memorable thing about it is that it’s at once disgusting, which is the reaction of the characters initially, and also — surprise! — life-giving.

Once again we see Catholic typology here: the flesh of the dead makes the living alive. Of course, those are the mysterious words of Christ that Catholics take literally and most Protestants take somewhat figuratively, as in John 6:56.

The boys have no desire to do it at first. One of them says that it’s “against the law.” We know he’s holding on to custom. Perhaps there are no universals in nature. In their scenario, it’s eat or die, and the only food is the flesh of their comrades. They are still so disturbed by doing so that all but three of them shield themselves from the dissections of the corpses.

And that means this movie is not for the squeamish. They have no means for fire, so the flesh is served as they collect it, raw and frozen.

Like many good survival movies, such as the recent “Thirteen Lives,” “Society” can have a profound effect. You watch shots of nothing but snow for almost two hours, and you watch these guys absolutely suffer to horrific ends, and then — when two of them traverse the mountains to find civilization — you see a faint hint of green in the landscape . . . that’s a powerful cinematic moment that’s worth watching this movie for.

It will make you feel, I suppose, what Barona wishes you to feel: death and resurrection, in your gut.

One other reason this movie is instructive in a non-Hollywood way: it acts as a cinematic memorial for all involved.

Every time there’s a moment where characters die, the film pauses to put their names and ages on screen. In the end credits, which I loved, you’ll see photos and other memorandum from the actual survival saga. The strong point here is that this isn’t a movie for entertainment. It’s an artistic means to remember the dead, and the past.

Therefore, as I ponder “Society of the Snow,” I don’t really think of the cannibalism at all. That’s just a necessary means of survival, yet it’s not the total vision of the work here.

Instead, cooperative people can help each other out, bringing life to each other. And that includes the dead, too, who are part and parcel of the Society these men made for 72 days in the Andes’ snow.

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