What’s Aged the Best?
Score; smoking; sequential shooting; permission to eat; natural accents; leadership; married couple
In the discussion (15)
Approx. transcript time · 00:37:20Read transcript
- The score and gorgeous main theme are aged-best choices.
- The constant cigarette smoking makes the film a classic smoking movie.
- The apparently inexhaustible cigarette supply across seventy days is questioned, including using cigarettes as birthday candles.
- Duty-free purchases or cigarette smuggling are speculative explanations for the supply.
- Smoking at altitude is questioned; hunger suppression and pleasure are proposed explanations.
- Imagined nicotine withdrawal would make a survivor intolerable, and the film could have done more with cigarette scarcity.
- Sequential shooting is praised for letting the cast grow thinner and more weathered as the story progresses.
- Characters sincerely granting permission to eat them are admired as a rare dramatic situation.
- Avoiding fake Uruguayan accents is an aged-best decision, compared with German characters using British accents and The Hunt for Red October's language transition.
- The blunt announcement that Alberto is dead is an aged-best detail.
- The emerging social hierarchy of leaders, healers and lazy people is admired.
- Antonio demanding recognition as captain raises the difference between sporting authority and crisis leadership; imagined Ringer roles and Yellowjackets illustrate hierarchies changing under pressure.
- The green-grass vision predicting a successful expedition is admired, with a joke that failed predictions would have no surviving witnesses to dispute them.
- Nando's gradual persuasion of Canessa to keep walking is an aged-best leadership detail, sometimes using small tricks to make continued progress seem inevitable.
- The married couple, including Douglas's character, supplies a convincing emotional anchor.