While Alive shares its basic premise of men surviving in a hostile environment after a plane crash, the similarities with The Grey end there. Another survival movie based on real events, it tells the story of the Uruguay rugby team stranded in the Andes mountains after their plane crashed in October 1972, who were forced to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. Director Frank Marshall adapts Piers Paul Read's book of the same name, preferring to emphasize the heroics of the characters rather than the spiritual themes touched upon in the opening scenes and prevalent in the original text. Given the grim subject matter, Alive is a restrained and sensitive film which doesn't seek to sensationalise the grotesque dilemma the men are faced with, and while the film is far from a masterpiece - Marshall offers none of the social commentary which also littered Read's book - it evokes the desperation the characters feel as their two month trial by nature slowly passes by. Alive more than impresses in the visual stakes, with the vast, ominous mountain on the Andes captured in the wonderful cinematography. The opening plane crash is also a superbly staged spectacle, a real edge-of-your-seat sequence which suggests that Marshall learned a thing or two about tension in the time he spent working alongside Steven Spielberg.
