WATCH NOW
I’ll admit here that I love disaster films. There always seems to be a never-ending supply of high-tension, disaster-ridden movies, and within the last decade, I’ve watched every significant studio’s natural disaster film. So it’s no wonder that the second I saw the trailer for The Mountain Between Us, I developed quite a bit of anticipation.
Unfortunately, despite an interesting premise and strong start, The Mountain Between Us becomes a rather uneventful, awkward film that for me personally has one of the most discomforting endings I’ve witnessed in the entire year of 2022.
Amidst their turbulent journey, two strangers (Kate Winslet and Idris Elba) have their flight canceled. To arrive in Denver, Colorado, they hop on a charter plane. During their flight, the pilot suffers a stroke. This leads to the plane crashing and stranding them on a snowy mountain. With nobody available to assist, the two of them have to navigate themselves down the mountain now. The goal is to find help before their injuries and the freezing temperatures take them.
After the plane crash, several things happen that result in a highly tense and stressful experience for the audience. The first act of the film is without a doubt the most captivating and gives moviegoers exactly what they expect from it: to be entertained.
Where the film begins to fall apart is when the two characters start heading down the mountain. The moment they begin walking down, the film drags to such an unexciting tempo, and nothing interesting indeed occurs. It is simply Kate and Idris having what feels like a never-ending argument and talking about who they were before the crash in a constant effort to try and understand each other, but they never do. To make it worse, everything is boring. None of their actions or dialogues made me root for them, thus I was concentrating on the scenery and the cinematography of the film (which is stunning!) instead of the story.
This is not an insult to Winslet’s and Elba’s skills. They both perform incredibly well and it’s rather shocking how much they carry the movie on their shoulders without destruction of boredom. Between the two, I suspect, carry sufficient talent to pull the entire film off, but the script is just too poorly written to pick up any movie onto its feet.
What frustrated me about The Mountain Between Us was the fact that initially, it seems like an action-thriller, but midway, it evolves into an unnatural and forced romantic drama. The two characters start to fall in love as the movie progresses, but their love story is so unrealistic. They spend most of the movie fighting over each other’s lives which is supposed to be the reason they fall in love, but it just doesn’t add up. Instead of these characters getting to know one another, it feels like they just happen to fall in love with the hero aspect of one another. It gets even more absurd when two of the characters, toward the end of the film get to have sex which is, in all likelihood, the most ridiculous sex scene of the year.
For the life of me, I can’t seem to wrap my head around why this movie shifted to a romance angle, instead of a film depicting two strangers coming together to find a way home. The latter would have seemed much more gripping and captivating than the story we got.
Hats off to everyone involved in this Mountain film. It’s one thing to green-light a film, but to involve a helicopter as part of the production crew’s mode of transport just shows the lengths to which this team went through. The environment on screen is all real and when you see the actors shivering from the cold, they’re not acting. Again, I appreciate the cinematography and want to point out that the audience is given several amazing shots showing off the wilderness in which our heroes are stranded. As far as the making of the movie goes, it sounds like everyone involved spent hellish hours putting this movie together, so it’s unfortunate that the payoff wasn’t quite as great.
To watch more movies like The Mountain Between Us (2017), visit 123Movies
Also watch for more movies like:
