I was vaguely aware of famous 1972 plane crash where survivors ended up eating their dead, but never saw a 1993 movie or read any of the subsequent books written about the accident. Still, the trailer looked good and pretty exciting so I decided to give it a try. It turned into very gripping movie with one of the most terrifying plane crash scenes in a move ever (right up next to the one in "Cast away") - the best of all, it left such a strong impression on me that I thought about it even this morning as I woke up.
What is it that makes this story still so powerful?
First, the whole improbability of the plane crash itself - we don't enter the rinky dinky planes expecting something bad will happen, in fact as much as I don't enjoy them, I just want to get over the whole journey and get to my destination as soon as possible. I flew a lot, I flew across Atlantic, across Asia all the way to Australia and it was never the big planes that gave me troubles but the small ones where somehow you feel unsafe. This was one of the small planes, with only 45 people onboard. Than we have adventure story without special heroes - these were just ordinary people, literary young rugby players traveling to their next match. Well maybe not so ordinary than, because these young guys were still fitter and braver than most of ordinary people - I could not help but noticing that my own 54 self would probably die immediately one way or another.
And than of course - the most gruesome part, eating of the dead. Movie makes it clear that it wasn't done without previous long agonising and finally only accepted when they heard on the radio that search was being cancelled and no other help was coming. I think that the most of us will agree that no matter how ugly and impossible this seems, it might be at least understand from the perspective of survivors - alone in a snow covered mountains, there is literary nothing else to eat except the corpses. And its up to you, do you want to live or are you ready to die because of some previous preconceptions. After all, different things are accepted in different parts of the world. Ancient warriors would eat the brains & hearts of their victims, believing it would make them braver. (In a somehow lesser gruesome manner, I am still cooking the chicken soup the way every household in Croatia has always done, with chitterlings, apparently its not done here and everybody is disgusted with me) What makes this really bad is that there was no cooking or boiling or somehow camouflaging the whole thing, they could not cover it with herbs and spices and pretend its something else - there was no pots and pans, not even fire, only several volunteers who went out in the snow and cut the frozen corpses with some sharp piece of glass.
The movie turned out to be excellent - it stayed with me for a long time. I am now ready to watch some more documentaries and find some books about it, because there is much more to know. For example, the fact that cannibalism was first hidden from the public but when it became known, it created such a worldwide sensation that eventually even church got involved and accepted that this is not a sin because it was extreme survival situation.
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