What strikes you is the front cover, I quote word for word: "Francis Ford Coppola presents...".
It's hard to see why a director like Francis Ford Coppola should present a film like this, putting his reputation on the line for so little... You sit there nice and comfy on your sofa waiting to feel the pathos creeping up your legs, and instead straight away you find yourself bogged down in the film's ending.
To say it's a terrible film from an artistic point of view is an understatement.
We really can't consider the actors as "character actors" ... apart from the scruffy little beard of good old Dennis Boutsikaris, nothing suggests that these two are mountain lovers. Her, managing to keep her hair perfectly set in the middle of the Himalayan snow... come on, really, some details...
Terrible acting: the actors have relaxed, serene faces even in the most tragic moments of the story. The climax of the tension is reached in the very first moments, keeping the viewer in suspense, and he won't feel any emotions other than the ones he felt in the first ten minutes of the film.
Not to mention the landscape, which has nothing Himalayan about it. Those who know the landscape well can't miss the immense fir forests typical of North America, and in fact the film was shot in lush though freezing Canada.
But is it possible to be anything other than furious? You, the director, go off to Canada to shoot a mountain film and you can't even give a sense of the vastness of the setting. Not to mention the storm, mentioned but completely absent from the footage... There are no interesting shots, no panoramas, rocks, verticality, nothing at all...
The moral, family, emotional pretext behind the film is so thin and poor that it leaves the viewer completely empty and dumbfounded.
A film strongly not recommended all round, from mountain lovers to anyone else who might still be vaguely interested...
Additional information on the FILM (DVD)
Title: Survive - I Sopravvissuti
Director: John Patterson
Cast: Dennis Boutsikaris Markie Post
Producer: CVC
Genre: Adventure
Year of production: 1997
Running time: 86
Year of production: colour
Region code: 2 (Europe/Japan)
Languages: English, Italian
Subtitles: Italian
Video format: Widescreen
Release date: September 2008
For a true story of survival in the mountains, watch La Morte Sospesa (Touching the Void) instead.