Mountain Between Us, The (2017) [Blu-ray]
Action | Adventure | Drama | Romance | Thriller

Tagline: What if your life depended on a stranger?

The Mountain Between Us is a high-altitude soap opera, woozy with overly telegraphed peril and determined to make the audience root for a couple who clearly aren’t meant for each other and played by actors who deserve a generous C-minus in chemistry. In the film’s production notes, Elba—considered dreamboat material by his many fans—notes that this is his first-ever romantic lead. His surprising awkwardness during the film’s intimate moments perhaps explains why.

Storyline: Stranded after a tragic plane crash, two strangers must forge a connection to survive the extreme elements of a remote snow covered mountain. When they realize help is not coming, they embark on a perilous journey across hundreds of miles of wilderness, pushing one another to endure and discovering strength they never knew possible. Written by Twentieth Century Fox

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, December 31, 2017 Back in the Dark Ages when I was in elementary school and there were these things called books, I read a fantastic adventure story whose name I still struggle to recall about a young boy who, along with a severely injured adult, survived a plane crash in the Sierra Nevadas in the depths of winter. It was so exciting to my then probably ten or eleven year old self that I kind of wanted to be in a plane crash myself (so much for the wisdom of youth), just so I could experience the thrill of foraging in the forest and proving that Mother Nature was no match for human ingenuity. My adult self was considerably less "excited" about a somewhat similar plot conceit informing The Mountain Between Us, a film which posits two grown ups surviving a plane crash in the depths of winter in the mountain range directly to the east of the Sierra Nevadas, the Uintas, in a region of Utah where I was probably living when I read that children's book years ago (the book on which this film is based evidently actually begins in Salt Lake City, something that's kind of oddly been switched to Boise for the film adaptation). The Mountain Between Us traffics in some traditional disaster and/or "survival" film tropes while also attempting, perhaps unwisely, to inject a kind of tear jerking romantic subtext to some of the proceedings. Ben Bass (Idris Elba) is a prominent neurosurgeon and Alex Martin (Kate Winslet) is a journalist who are thrust together by the vagaries of fate when weather cancels their flights. Both have supposedly important appointments which can't be canceled, and so team together to charter a private plane to get them to their destinations. When that plane's pilot, Walter (Beau Bridges), succumbs to a stroke while flying, the plane crashes, leaving Ben and Alex stranded on a wintry mountaintop where personal issues begin intruding into the story.

From the get go, The Mountain Between Us hinges on an array of contrivances that some may find stretch the bounds of believability further than they maybe should have. Alex arrives at what is assumedly the Boise airport to find out her flight has been canceled due to an impending storm (one kind of odd contextual issue the film faces in these early scenes is that the outdoor material shows bright, clear skies and, aside from some sound effects supposedly establishing winds whipping up, no evidence of any devastating storm). She overhears Ben desperately trying to arrange some sort of flight since he has an operation to get to the next day, and just out of the gate she approaches Ben and tells him she has a "plan". With absolutely no explanation as to how she either formulated or in fact realized this plan, the two walk out onto the tarmack and introduce themselves to Walt, who's working in a hangar and agrees to get them to Denver for connecting flights on one of his charter planes.

For those who haven't been dissuaded from ever flying again after having seen calamitous plane crashes in films like Cast Away, Alive, The Grey, Flight, Fearless and countless others may finally find reason to stay far, far away from anything with fixed wings after the crash detailed in The Mountain Between Us, one whose inherent anxiety levels are only raised due to the fact that Bridges does such a fabulous job documenting the confusion and terror Walt is experiencing as he suffers a stroke while attempting to pilot his little plane. This riveting and unabashedly terrifying sequence leaves Walt deceased and both Ben and (especially) Alex wounded in the shattered fuselage of the plane, which has come to rest on the side of a snowswept mountain peak. Of course, Walt had never filed a flight plan (in just another plot contrivance that some may take issue with), and so Ben and Alex know it's up to them to get to civilization.

For the initial part of the "survival" section of the film, The Mountain Between Us does a commendable job of documenting both the purely physical aspects of the situation as well as the unfolding personal drama between the two characters. But as the story moves along, things become increasingly mawkish, with needless attempts to inject life threatening vignettes at regular intervals. These include the incursion of a mountain lion, a fall from a cliff and, later, an icy plunge into frigid waters. It's like a laundry list of survival film clichés, and while all of it is delivered with considerably energy by Winslet and Elba, there's nonetheless a kind of rote feeling to it all.

Where The Mountain Between Us really tends to go off the rails, though, is in its introduction of a romantic subplot between Ben and Alex, something that starts developing fairly early on but which rises to fever pitch once they find an abandoned cabin. (I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but it's kind of interesting to me that the long ago children's book I read also featured its characters finding an abandoned cabin and in fact also featured a character crashing through thin ice on a supposedly frozen lake that was right next to the cabin, which makes me wonder if novelist Charles Martin may have read the same book I did when he was a little boy.) This kind of odd detour suddenly puts the film in a kind of tragic love story ambience that it is never quite able to fully recover from, with an overly labored coda that struggled mightily to get to its happily ever after. Still, Winslet and Elba are well matched here, and do credible work in what is often an incredible scenario.

Fans of Winslet and/or Elba will probably be willing to overlook some of the more incredible aspects of The Mountain Between Us, and the film does offer some spectacular scenery to help distract from some needlessly melodramatic plotting. Technical merits are first rate, and with caveats duly noted, The Mountain Between Us comes Recommended.

[CSW] -3.0- How do I say that I disliked liking this movie. Great actors, but they never clicked with me making this a so-so romance. As a survival story, the movie has some major plot holes. As a Yin and Yang sheer determination movie it rang true. As a post-traumatic stress syndrome survival story it also rang true. And the pushing beyond your limits when you are pretty sure of a bad outcome anyway, that too rang true. Along with the almost military dependence and motivation to save your partner even at great personal sacrifice was evident too. For these reasons I disliked liking this movie.
[V4.5-A5.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box


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