The Mountain Between Us Is So Trite And Dull, It's Chilling

Rare is the trip by airplane that goes exactly as planned. You're bound to end up getting transferred to another flight or missing some piece of luggage or landing hours later than originally expected if you end up choosing this mode of transportation. Dr. Ben Bass (Idris Elba) and Alex Martin (Kate Winslet) were already facing the kind of mundane difficulties we all go through when trying to embark on a flight, namely being unable to get on flights they absolutely need to get on for extremely important personal events (Bass has a patient he has to perform surgery on while Martin is getting married the next day).



Thankfully it looks like a solution arises once they get onboard a tiny plane that houses just them, a dog and a pilot (Beau Bridges) and can take them to where they need to go. Everything seems to be going swimmingly until a storm comes out and wipes out their plane, leaving Bass, Martin and the dog stranded in the mountains. These two have no idea what to do or if any help is gonna come for them (the pilot failed to put down a flight plan indicating that the trio had gone out on his aircraft). Though their personalities are heavily different from one another, with Bass being a controlling worrywart and Martin being a steadfast can-do type of person, they're gonna have to work together if they want to have any semblance of hope of getting off this mountain and back to civilization.

The Mountain Between Us is a tremendously strange creature, a movie that starts out as a humdrum survivalist thriller that's trying to evoke the likes of Cast Away and The Martian before swerving late in its second act into being a melodramatic romance feature with neither component working well together nor functioning properly on their individual merits. As a survival movie, it's tiring to see the majority of the conflict of the story derive from the thinly sketched personalities of the lead characters instead of the elements the have to survive in. The characterization elements for these kind of movies should make one endear to the lead characters so that we become invested in their plight but Ben just comes off as repetitively whiny while Alex has no real depth to speak of.

That means it's really hard to become invested in rooting for their survival once they become stuck in the snow, especially since director Hany Abu-Assad just can't seem to get a handle on how to properly film scenes meant to convey danger in an intimidating fashion. An early moment where Ben slips down a snowy hill is executed in a fashion more reminiscent of slapstick comedy than a heart-pounding thriller. At least the duo's time spent out in the wilderness allows an accompanying doggie to have plenty of time to shine, this little fella is just so darn happy at everything, as indicated by his big o'l tail constantly wagging, it's an adorable sight.

Oh how I wish that the movie was about the dog instead, perhaps then we could have been spared the various poorly written dialogue exchanges between the two lead characters. The screenplay by Chris Weitz and J. Mills Goodloe is chock full of poorly written and overly obvious lines (you just know where Ben's character is gonna go the moment he declares the heart to be merely a way for the body to pump blood early on in the story) and that negative component of the motion picture becomes an even bigger issue than it already is once an abruptly introduced budding romance between Ben and Alex becomes the focus of the feature. Melodramatic romance can be quite enjoyable when done right, and while that's just what The Mountain Between Us aspires to, it just can't make its romance palpable or exciting.

There's simply no fun or intrigue in the way it executes the romance between Ben and Alex, all of their dialogue and actions feel cribbed from superior romantic fare and asking us to care about their romantic entanglement only compounds what poorly written characters these are. Even talented actors like Kate Winslet and Idris Elba, despite having some interesting chemistry early on in the plot, can't save this messy romantic angle as the duo turn in some of their weaker performances in recent memory with Winslet in particular deliver a number of stiff line readings that are utterly shocking to hear come from such a top-caliber actor. It feels like Winslet was more alive in the first Divergent movie for goodness sakes! But can anyone really be expected to deliver superb acting when they're stuck starring in a movie like The Mountain Between Us that seems to be the result of smashing together a Jack London novel and a Nicholas Sparks tome?