Alive (1993)

(In French, On Cable TV, January 2019) Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: Alive is a movie about survival up in the mountains after a plane crash, and it’s adapted from famous real events in which the survivors ate the body of the deceased for sustenance. The nervous jokes about cannibalism were all over the release of the film back in 1993, and they’re still the first thing that most people talk about when they talk about that film. For good reason too—survival movies come and go, but they usually fade away quickly—does anyone even remember 2018’s The Mountain Between Us? Alive has a tricky element to deal with, and director Frank Marshall does have the decency of being skillful at the way it goes about it. Otherwise, it does remain a decent survival story: capable actors, harrowing plot, some dodgy pre-CGI special effects, and a bit of an uplifting conclusion. But if Alive sticks in mind, it won’t be for much of the film—it will be for those five minutes where it steps away from the norm, and can do so without accusation of gratuitous exploitation because it’s adapted from real events.