Now that he’s been freed from the Rings of Power chain gang, J.A. Bayona — director of The Orphanage, The Impossible and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom — has set his sites on making a modern update for a story that many people know but few people actually understand. Yep, that’s right: for Society of the Snow, he’ll be taking on the same subject matter as the genuinely bizarre ’93 teen survival flick Alive, albeit with a more modern and understated tone. We’ve now realized that some of the zoomers out there might have missed the time in which everybody suddenly thought it was cool to make gags about a Uruguayan Rugby team that got stranded in the Andes after a plane crash, so let’s just say that it really was survival-at-any-cost. Featuring a cast of unknowns, Society of the Snow looks like some pretty solid (and very scary) stuff, at least from this trailer that Netflix dropped earlier on Thursday.
Take a look:
Here’s a synopsis, which is redundant given that there have been two previous movies made about this story (the aforementioned Alive and its predecessor, the bizarre Survive!, released just four years after the crash in 1976):
“In 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which had been chartered to fly a rugby team to Chile, crashed in the heart of the Andes. Only 29 of its 45 passengers survived the accident. Trapped in one of the most hostile and inaccessible environments on the planet, they have to resort to extreme measures to stay alive.”
Society of the Snow will have its world premiere on September 9, when it closes out this year’s edition of the Venice International Film Festival, and it doesn’t currently have a wide release date, though Netflix claims it’ll be out by the end of 2023.