I Am Alive: Surviving the Andes Plane Crash

Since two motion pictures, A & E, PBS and National Geographic have jumped in after the newspapers and best selling books, The History Channel gives it their turn surprisingly with a formative take even after all of the documentation before it. This time around the main perspective comes from Fernando "Nando" Parrado who played a key role in the Andes plane crash of 1972. The Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 involved 45 passengers, including a team of rugby players called The Old Christians and other family and crew, who were on their way to Chile with no danger in sight until the pilot makes a grave error that caused everyone involved to make impossible decisions to hang on for survival in a weather stricken region with no wildlife or vegetation in sight.

A share of the tone of this documentary is somewhat calm and relaxed and more text book at first than other mediums that have concentrated on putting the audience in the now from a dramatic side. Towards the latter half with Nando and Roberto going through the mountains, they can't help but tell the story with straight feelings, as that's all they had to back them, apart from their skin and bones which nearly gave out. Both of the segments from A & E's "Minute by Minute" from 2002 and National Geographic's "Trapped" from 2007 tried to do the subject in under an hour by concentrating on the main portions of action, but still didn't give a completely thorough approach or show exactly how they got to each one of their motivations apart from jumping dot to dot. Those served more as introduction pieces to further the ambitions of upstarting TV shows and point to another medium. Though "I Am Alive" stands on its own by being thoroughly researched, even if you've seen the other documentaries on the subject. It doesn't seem forced with distracting poetic license or snazzy filmmaking. While they still give some brief reenactments, this focuses on getting a clear perspective from facts and fine details with passionate interviews from the survivors and related experts who still find the experience endearing and engrossing this many years later. This includes mostly spoken English with some overdubbed Spanish.

"I Am Alive" unfolds like a picture book with a share of information and visual representations of the accident and the 72 days that followed. While moving "Stranded" documentary from 2007 focused on the spiritual bonding of friends and how they viewed their situation from an emotional context, this is by far out of the documentaries that I've seen the one that gives the most clear and concise technical understanding. For instance, precisely how and why the plane crashed. There are even diagrams with historians telling their track record. "Of the 78 Fairchild FH-227s built, 23 crashed, and there were a total of 393 fatalities." There are real life pictures of where they hit the mountains, and then CGI graphics to show how lucky they were to land just so to have not made a sudden impact and disintegrated. The surrounding area is shown of exactly where they ended up on the side of Argentina, not in Chile like the pilots anticipated.

As the events come up, the experts give facts about head injuries, starvation, avalanches, inventing devices from supplies, traveling through the Andes and mountaineering. A climber and a team went back to cover some of the same distances Nando and Roberto did, which took them 10 days and 37 long and hard miles till they seen green. Photos were taken of the road that Roberto saw from the top of the first summit that they argued about at the time if they should head that way, but at that point being lost, unsure and hungry and then making the wrong move could have been life or death. I found it interesting that they discussed if they went east towards Argentina instead of west towards Chile if their chances would have improved. In the after author Piers Paul Read talks about his book "Alive" and the fear from the survivors of how it would be written after all of the sensationalist press around the globe.

What's mostly effective about "I Am Alive" is they weren't frequently making justifications for their actions after the fact. Nando carries the bulk and speaks somewhat unscripted as if he knows the story like the back of his hand. At times they still speak their piece, such as Nando calling what they did "anthropophagy" rather than cannibalism, since it didn't follow murder. At other times he speaks rather candidly, such as explaining that the avalanche saved the remaining people's lives due to it covering them from further storms, and then incidentally taking 8 more bodies that they used for food for the remaining days till they could trek out when weather conditions improved. It says a lot for him and the 15 others, but not so much for those that didn't make it out. It does state some facts a little directly and somewhat coldly as a result, though, on the other hand, it leaves room for the viewer to decide their stance. What makes this work is it's capable of uncovering more answers from stepping back somewhat and not making this completely a heavy hitter that "Stranded" already did so well. (Also submitted on http://fromblacktoredfilmreviews.blogspot.com/ along with reviews for "Supervivientes de los Andes," "Alive," "Alive: 20 Years Later," "The 1972 Andes Survivors," "Alive in the Andes" and "Stranded")

that these people went through. That tragic event that took place in their lives in 1972, I just cannot fathom how much I deeply am saddened of the loss of the majority of the people on board but I'm also extremely inspired by how the survivors held it together and managed to survive such an horrific ordeal to some of natures deadliest and ugliest turns.

This amazing documentary and reenactments really shows truly the lives of the survivors and what they all had to go through in this devastating event. Interviews from survivors as well as heart-wrenching scenes and real photographs from the terrifying ordeal.

This truly shows what the human being can do even when faced with extreme adversity. To fight for survival in such a way that this makes this one of the most well known survival stories to date.

Very well made - put together, everything was on point and they went into every detail. This is a must see, such a sad but yet also inspiring story. 10/10.

There's probably no greater a 20th century survival story than what became known as the Miracle Of The Andes. It began on October 13, 1972, when a Uruguayan Air Force plane carrying forty passengers and a crew of five went off course and crashed in the Andes. It came to an end on December 22, 1972, when two of the survivors of the crash hiked thirty-seven miles out of the Andes and west into Chile. Out of the forty passengers, many of whom were members of a Uruguayan rugby crew traveling to Chile to play a match, only sixteen people made it out alive. And in those 72 days, those involved had to make arguably the most horrifying decision imaginable in order to survive. This is the story told by the History Channel's 2010 documentary film I AM ALIVE: SURVIVING THE ANDES PLANE CRASH.

Combining a staged recreation of the events along with interviews from the two men, Fernando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, who made the long trek from the crash site into Chile, plus several other survivors, I AM ALIVE also reveals, though interviews with aeronautical and mountain climbing veterans, aspects of the crash and the subsequent ordeal that were not necessarily known by the public at large, or even the survivors, at the time. For one, the aircraft that was being used to charter the rugby team, the Fairchild, had a very poor safety record at the time. For another, the pilots misjudged their position in flying over the Andes, making a right turn northward toward Santiago well before they would have actually totally crossed the range. The survivors themselves had believed, from the dying words of the pilot, that they had passed the town of Curico in Chile, which meant that the Andes had been breached. But in truth, the fuselage that they had to spend two months surviving in lay on a glacier just within the Argentinean side of the range, between the Tinguiririca Volcano in Chile (fifteen miles to the southwest) and Cerro Sosneado (20 miles due east), at an elevation of 11,700 feet. Because the roof of the Fairchild was white, even the planes that spent seven days flying right over where the fuselage lay could never have seen it, buried as it was in tens of feet of snow. They were given up for dead after the seventh day. And when the survivors ran out of normal food in or near the tenth day of the ordeal, they had to make that terrible decision that defined this tragic saga: to eat the remains of their dead friends in order not only to survive, but to allow Parrado and Canessa the strength to surmount the Andes and get help.

The Andean saga, which was told quite well on the big screen via the 1993 film ALIVE (based on the 1974 book of the same name by English writer Piers Paul Read, who is one of those interviews here), is given further resonance by showing the viewer the stark bareness of the mountain landscape, and the immense dangers they faced, including the avalanche that hit the fuselage seventeen days into the ordeal and snuffed out the lives of eight who survived the initial crash. Each of the sixteen survivors had to endure the kind of psychological horror and trauma that few human beings have ever experienced or are ever likely to experience; and, in the case of Parrado, that included losing his mother and younger sister. But the will not only to survive but to just plain live was what drove Parrado and Canessa to do what they did to save their fourteen companions, and that is the big achievement of the Andean saga.

Those that died during the ordeal, either from what they suffered in the initial crash or the avalanche itself are not glossed over in favor of the "heroes", but are remembered with dignity; and the much-talked-about aspect of cannibalism (or anthropophagy) is handled in a matter-of-fact way far removed from the gruesome sensationalism of SURVIVE!, that infamously horrible 1976 Mexican exploitation film of the incident. I AM ALIVE is probably the definitive documentary of this terrible saga that ultimately becomes a triumph of the human will and a memorial to those lost; and in the end, this is the aspect one should get from watching it.