Everyone knows about the plane that crashed in the Andes Mountains in 1972, and there's exactly one reason why: The survivors resorted to cannibalism. Ask anyone and they'll tell you. "Andes Mountains? Plane crash? Oh, yeah. They had to eat each other." They might get the other details wrong -- I always thought it was a Chilean soccer team, not a Uruguayan rugby team -- but you better believe they'll remember the cannibalism.

Never mind the other astonishing facts of the story, like the group surviving for 72 days in arctic weather, or the avalanche that buried them halfway through the ordeal, or the incredibly arduous trek that two of the survivors finally made in order to secure rescue for the rest. Those dramatic elements are part of many true stories, not to mention many movies we've seen and books we've read. But cannibalism! That's shocking and taboo and titillating enough to warrant further attention.

The makers of Alive, the film version of the incident that was released 16 years ago this week, must have known going in that no matter how delicately and tactfully they addressed the issue, their film was going to be known as "the one about the plane-crash survivors who had to eat their friends." It was unavoidable. There had already been a sleazy production, made in Mexico in 1976 and dubbed into English under the title Survive!, that focused exactly on what you'd expect a sleazy production to focus on. But perhaps there is no way to dramatize this story, no matter how sensitive you are, without it seeming silly or exploitative. The story involves cannibalism for crying out loud, a topic that can be discussed politely or effectively but not both. Inherently, the subject is -- you'll pardon the term -- tasteless. As Roger Ebert said, "there are some stories you simply can't tell."

Furthermore, while moviegoers don't mind a little cannibalism here and there, we generally prefer it to be stylized and unrealistic. We like the thrill of flesh-eating zombies in horror movies (whose undead status might render them no longer human and thus not cannibals, strictly speaking, but never mind), and we like scary-but-funny villains on the order of Hannibal Lecter. In other words, we don't really want to think about it very much. Morally ambiguous cannibalism, arrived at only as a necessity after anguished discussion, is kind of a buzzkill.

Alive does hew closely to the facts. The director, Frank Marshall, clearly wanted to honor the victims, not sensationalize them, and one of the survivors (the one played by Ethan Hawke) served as a technical adviser. The 2002 DVD of the film is curiously labeled "30th Anniversary Edition," referring not to the age of the movie but to the number of years since the real-life plane crash. I am unaware of any other DVDs using this system of reckoning. Perhaps we'll see a "100th Anniversary Edition" of Titanic in 2012.

Marshall, while prolific and talented as a big-time Hollywood producer, had only directed one feature film before Alive, and it was 1990's Arachnophobia. What possessed him to tackle a film so thematically fraught and logistically challenging (the cast and crew spent weeks on a Canadian glacier) is anyone's guess, especially when he had so many more experienced directors in his Rolodex. I note that Marshall's two subsequent directorial efforts, Congo and Eight Below, also take place in inhospitable locations, and Eight Below, set in Antarctica, was filmed in Canada and Greenland. Maybe Marshall just likes being cold?

As audiences discovered when they saw the film 16 years ago, Alive is disappointingly mundane. Marshall's desire to be careful overpowered his desire to make an interesting and adventurous film, and the screenplay, by John Patrick Shanley (who in 2008 turned his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt into a successful movie), treats the elephant in the room so lightly as to be absurd. The film is half over before the topic of cannibalism is discussed as a real, necessary option; it's fretted over for a few minutes; they do it; and then the movie never mentions it again. Subsequent references to food are obliquely described as "rations."

So the film isn't lurid, but it isn't very exciting, either. You never get a real sense of the deprivation and hardship the survivors experienced, and the acting by the young cast has too many community-theater-level histrionic outbursts. The fact that many of the actors were fair-skinned and light-haired was a source of some controversy when the film opened, but while it's true that most of Uruguay's population is of Spanish and Italian descent, quite a few are of Northern European extract, including several on the doomed rugby team in question. I was more concerned about Ethan Hawke's wispy facial hair, which appears only on his upper lip and chin. Was the character somehow shaving the rest of it, or is that just the only place it grows on Hawke's face?

It's only 16 years old, but already the film has not aged well, for two major reasons. The first is technological: The plane-crash sequence is embarrassingly bad by modern standards. The green-screen effects are lousy, and when the back half of the plane is torn off, passengers sucked out of it as if through a drinking straw, the rest of the passengers sit in silence. There is no mayhem, no panicking, no terror. Once the plane hits the ground, everyone behaves more or less rationally, as if having been only mildly inconvenienced.

Strangely enough, when the film was released, the crash scene was touted as one of its best, even by critics who didn't like the rest of the movie. They called it scary, terrifying and vivid. The MPAA gave the film an R rating specifically "for crash scenes too intense for unaccompanied children" -- but watching it now, I thought the brief episodes of cannibalism were far more gruesome than anything in that crash. We've undoubtedly seen too many plane crashes depicted far more realistically to buy this one anymore.

The other reason the film hasn't aged well is that it's been supplanted by a much better documentary, released late in 2007 under the title Stranded: I Have Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains. This might be the only way to properly tell the story: to have it come from the mouths of the survivors themselves. They were interviewed extensively for the film, speaking eloquently and poignantly about the ordeal in a way that a fictionalized account would be hard-pressed to duplicate. Alive appears to be have been made with the best of intentions, but it fails as either a tribute or an inspiring Hollywood drama.

FROM THE TIME CAPSULE: When Alive was released, 16 years ago this week, on Jan. 15, 1993...

• It opened in third place at the box office, surpassed by holiday holdovers Aladdin and A Few Good Men. Also opening were Jean-Claude Van Damme's Nowhere to Run and Madonna's Body of Evidence, which came in at fourth and fifth places. (Then as now, January was kind of a wasteland for new releases.) Scent of a Woman, The Bodyguard and The Crying Game were all still going strong.


• You might have been too sad to go out and watch Alive because this afternoon, the final episode of the soap opera Santa Barbara had aired. Even now, 16 years later, you might not have fully recovered from that blow.


• TV shows Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had just premiered, with Homicide: Life on the Street and Beavis and Butt-Head set to debut within the next few weeks.


• Baseball's Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins had been created and would play their first games in April. The Buffalo Bills were about to lose their third consecutive Super Bowl, this time to the Dallas Cowboys.


• Michael Jackson was about to grant a TV interview to Oprah Winfrey, his first such interview since 1979. The U.S. Postal Service had just issued an Elvis Presley stamp. On the radio, Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" was the No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, as it had been for four weeks already. It would stay at the top for a total of 14 weeks, a record at the time. (That record was later broken by "One Sweet Day," by Mariah Carey & Boyz II Men, which was No. 1 for 16 weeks in 1995-96.)


• Stephen King's Dolores Claiborne was at the top of the New York Times best seller list. King's Gerald's Game was also on the list, as were John Grisham's The Pelican Brief, Danielle Steel's Mixed Blessings and Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless.


• George H.W. Bush had just five days left in office before Bill Clinton would be inaugurated as his replacement. Somewhere, Monica Lewinsky is buying a dress.


• Dizzy Gillespie had died nine days earlier. Deaths within the next month would include Audrey Hepburn, Thurgood Marshall, Andre the Giant and Arthur Ashe.

* * * * *

Eric's Time Capsule appears every Monday at Film.com. You can visit Eric at his website, where Soylent Green is always in season.

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