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I agree with everyone who believes Marshall did a good job by focusing on the boys’ unyielding religion and their eventual submission to cannibalism. Excluding the importance of either of these factors would be ignoring the boys’ desperate struggle for survival day after day and how they found the will to survive for so long in such hopeless circumstances.
However, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed by the portrayal of some of the characters. I understand it is very difficult to include more than four or five main roles, but the Strauch cousins (and to a lesser extent Numa Turcatti) played a significant role in the mountains that was largely ignored in the film. In fact, Fito Strauch was hailed in the book as perhaps the wisest and smartest of all the characters, and perhaps held more control over the group than even Parrado and Canessa. It is apparent that he and Eduardo are the ones who are able to maintain order and keep everybody civilized in the face of death. Unfortunately in the film they are reduced to only a few minutes of screen time and we hardly remember they were even included at all by the end. I think we can all agree that in reality they were perhaps as important as anybody else in the boys’ survival, and the only thing that separated them from the most prominent heroes (Parrado and Canessa) was physical health/strength. Personally I would’ve preferred more scenes depicting the stoic seriousness and intelligence of the cousins rather than some of the comic relief provided by Carlitos and others.