Society of the Snow
Directed by J.A. BayonaIn 1972, the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, chartered to fly a rugby team to Chile, catastrophically crashes on a glacier in the heart of the Andes. Only 16 of the 40 passengers survived the crash, and finding themselves in one of the world's toughest environments, they are forced to resort to extreme measures to stay alive.
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Society of the Snow Ratings & Reviews
- TanalienNovember 2, 2024Society of the Snow is a film that pushes the audience to the limit of acceptable experience. In a dramatic interpretation of a real-life event, our cast of characters are Uruguayan survivors of a plane crash, living in the remaining wreckage somewhere in the Andes Mountains. With artistic direction, the emotions that the characters feel find their way to the audience: distress, nail-biting tension, and absolute dread.
- rg9400November 1, 2024A well-beloved recent movie...and I did not like it one bit. This might be fairly controversial, but I genuinely struggled a lot to finish this movie. It seems weird to say this about something based on a true story, but this movie felt very familiar to me. I've seen a variety of crash and survival stories by now, and though this one is grounded in truth, it can't help but feel familiar to those other similar fictional stories. However, because it is chained to a true story, it struggles to take this story into a different direction than the types of survival stories you usually get. Most of the characters feel interchangeable, and I could not build an emotional connection to any of them. I knew the types of sacrifices that the characters would have to make, and beyond that, the movie doesn't actually delve into anything regarding sort of the social and power structures that arise after this type of event, despite its name and again those similar post-crash survival stories. The movie wants to be about the power of the human spirit, perseverance against immeasurable odds, but it doesn't earn that in my opinion. Instead, it relies on the nature of the real events it is based upon and the structure of this type of story, in the same way sports dramas or biopics try to create expectation just based on tropes versus mining new ground themselves. Because of that, it almost feels exploitative at times. The final straw to me is that the actual filmmaking technicals, e.g. the acting or the cinematography, never stand out either, making the whole thing a real slog to get through at 2.5 hours long.
