Note: It’s impossible to discuss the movie without giving away spoilers. Pretty much everyone going into this probably knows what happened, but if you don’t you’ve been warned.
I walked into Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane that Crashed in the Mountains wondering if I could make it through the picture without becoming disgusted, and I found that the what everyone remembers about the story- cannibalism-is not the main focus. It’s more about in an insane situation, and it’s own way is kind of life affirming.
The story has been previously told in Frank Marshall’s 1993 fiction film Alive (which I have not seen), and well known in the annals of airline disasters. In 1972, a plane flying from Uruguay to Chile crashed in the mountains of Argentina. The passengers consisted almost entirely of members of a Uruguayan college rugby team, their friends, girlfriends and family. Seventeen of the forty-five people on board died within twenty four hours of the crash. The remaining twenty-eight would have to find some way to survive in the cold with very little food for seventy two days. The governments of Uruguay, Chile and Argentina tried a rescue but the bad weather meant that the plane could only be visible for one hour a day, and it was white against white snow, and no one knew where the plane was when it went down, and eventually the passengers realized that they would have to in some way be in the instruments of their own rescue.
Director Gonzolo Arijon avoids what could have very easily become an Oprah – type inspiration story. Instead, he focuses on the sociological aspects of what happened- how a new world with new rules was formed immediately after the crash. Death was always close at hand, the survivors deal with it as best they can. Some lose their fear of death or the desire to live, or both, others fight until they end so they can return. Nearly all of them become very spiritual, and this how the film becomes a positive statement.
It is not so much their will to live or their endurance that is moving (though it is to a degree) then it is there the attitude towards the event afterwards. Many of the survivors return to the crash site and there are tears but one man says “I’m glad I came here.” This event has haunted these men for thirty years, but it has not broken them. They bring their children with them, and they celebrate and thank the dead. One says that he feels the dead “Gave their muscles so we might live” and that’s how the men seem to feel. Many equate what they did to a kind of Holy Communion, where the dead gave their body for the life of others.
The movie ends with footage of the men as they play soccer game. They all still live in the same small town. They did what they needed to do to live, and in watching this film, I learned that living is to a degree in end unto itself.
Stranded: I've Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains(2008)