cinema history class: survive! (1976)

The session: "April is the Cruelest Month -- Cardona's Catastrophes"
Four movies by the two Rene Cardonas -- father and son

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 1: Survive! (1976)
Directed by Rene Cardona

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I hadn't heard of this.

Plot:
A charter flight crashes in the Andes, and the survivors have to resort to cannibalism to stay alive.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Survive! is brutal in its simplicity. I've seen a bunch of disaster movies -- Earthquake was one of my earliest experiences at a movie theater. And they all manage to work relationships into the narrative. They tell the stories of people dealing with, well, disasters. But they include character development, so we care about the people and experience the pathos. But that's just not so with Survive!. It's not character driven at all -- unless the situation itself is the star (an astute observation that Dave made). At the end of the film, I couldn't have even given the names of any of the characters.

Having said that, I should acknowledge that Keith showed us the English language version of this film. The Spanish language version, which was a half hour longer, probably did include character development. And we did get the faintest hint of that, as we saw the father of one of the airplane passengers pleading with local officials to keep searching. And there was a tiny bit at the end as he waited patiently to see if his son would emerge from the helicopter that was carrying survivors. I don't know if I would have enjoyed the longer version with more character development. In a sense, it wasn't needed. This was the version without the gristle.

A lot of the film was done very well. Watching the plane crash, I almost felt as if I was there with them. The miserable cold feel of the film was captivating.

Ratings
Me: 8
Bob-O: 8.8
Christina: 9.4
Dave: 9.5
Ethan: 9