Alive

Not every good story needs to be made into a movie.

Marshall is a good technician, but there's no sense of artistic adventure in his sometimes exciting, sometimes draggy movie. He's content to scratch the surface of a great and harrowing story.

The location photography is impressive, the scenery is awesome, the re-enactment of the air crash is terrifying and uses convincing special effects. We care about the characters while we watch the movie. But at the end it all seems elusive.

A traumatizing but ultimately uplifting story about the human spirit. 1993 means that the cast is uniformly white (and a little generic), but the powerful elements of the real life story, including the crash, the avalanche, and the trek out, all work

...an overlong yet mostly satisfying true-life tale...

Usually classified as a drama, Alive is an authentic recreation of this harrowing ordeal and one of the best examples of true survival horror ever committed to film.

It's that age-old question of many worthy movies: whether the mere documentation of an important event (à la Gandhi or Schindler's List) automatically makes it a great film?