The team has shelter in the fuselage of the plane, and can melt snow to provide water. But they lack food, and with no rescue forthcoming, are forced to eat the dead. Alas, this is all that most casually aware of the incident can remember.
Matters are made worse by a catastrophic avalanche at night that buries the fuselage and covers many survivors in snow.
The team's Plan A is a small expedition to find the plane's tail, which separated during the crash and contains batteries that might allow use of the plane's radio. But the exercise is futile, and Plan B is for the strongest survivors to hike to the base of the Andes where human life might be encountered.
The ultimate hero among the passengers, Nando Parrado, was a production consultant. Team captain Antonio (Vincent Spano) is the initial leader, along with medical student Roberto (Josh Hamilton), but Nando (Ethan Hawke) emerges as the team's hope once he decides to embark upon the arduous and inclement hike towards civilization.
Interesting supporting roles include Illeana Douglas as the wife of non-team member Javier (Sam Behrens), José Zúñiga as a selfish and generally dislikable mechanic, and John Malkovich as a survivor twenty years later looking back on the ordeal.
Based on the book by Piers Paul Read, an international best-seller during the mid-1970s. John Patick Shanley, who won an Oscar for Moonstruck and later had exceptional success with the play "Doubt", receives sole screenplay credit.
How others will see it. Alive turned a modest profit and drew mixed reviews. Most praised the heart-pounding crash sequence but weren't keen on the subplot of cannibalism, the numerous references to prayer, or the Western appearance of the actors. The movie was mostly ignored by the various awards committees.
Today, at imdb.com, the film has a reasonable 21K user votes but the user ratings are middling at 6.9. Across all age demographics, women like it more than do men, perhaps out of sympathy for the plight of the attractive young male leads.
How I felt about it. A subset of the "Miracle of the Andes" is the miracle of Nando, who nearly dies from a concussion and ought to have died from exposure that first night. He then loses his mother and sister, yet develops greater will to survive than anyone. It's Nando who saves the others, since Roberto seems unwilling to endure the hazardous expedition alone.
The obvious question the film poses is, would we eat the bodies of our companions to survive? The answer is Yes, an uncomfortable truth most of us prefer not to face. This is why Alive was on the shelf for some twenty years prior to its production.
It really is a miracle that anyone survived the crash, let alone the aftermath on a desolate mountain where temperatures fall to 30 below zero after dark. That they did so for some 70 days, and two people then managed to hike tens of miles to their rescue, seems beyond belief.
But it really did happen. The film is credible because it is more or less authentic. The survivors are crabby, selfish, or cowardly as often as they are heroic. Malkovich states "until you're in a situation like that you have no idea how you'd behave." This is as apt an observation as any, and serves as the true theme of the movie.