Eric Valenti
Staff Writer
I went and saw “The Mountain Between Us.” I had seen the trailers for the movie and the movie’s description. It appeared to be a movie that has a deep plot between two characters but also has a realistic look on what would happen if you were stranded on a frigid cold mountain. I expected the movie to have a cold and lonely tone, but the movie turned out to be more of a warm-hearted love story.
I saw the movie in an AMC theater in New Jersey. When the movie began, I watched as characters were set up and relationships were explained. The movie was pretty typical, it didn’t do anything that was unique in terms of filming techniques. The acting is really what held the movie together, the emotion and chemistry between the two main characters is the main reason to see the film.
The movie follows a journalist, Alex Martin (Kate Winslet) who is trying to get to Denver for her wedding and a surgeon, Dr. Ben Bass (Idris Elba) who is trying to get to a patient in Denver but their flight has been canceled. The journalist finds someone who can fly them to Denver and the plane ends up crashing on a snowy mountain.
In the beginning of the film, I was really excited to see the movie, I had seen a lot of survival movies like “Cast Away” and “Apocalypto,” and these films created a feeling of loneliness and made a bond between the audience and the main character where if they died, you felt like you died. The Mountain Between Us didn’t really do this for me.
There were a lot of times where one the characters nearly died but I don’t really have a connection with the characters. The beginning set everything up fairly quickly and did it so that didn’t seem forced. There were times in the film where things began to drag because they focused on the love between the two characters and they didn’t leave the crash site for like 30 minutes of the film. Towards the middle when they finally left things were trying to kill them left and right, starvation, falling from a cliff, drowning or even a mountain lion. These parts are what kept the film going and had the audience in an awe. The ending without any spoilers is a little confusing but is heartfelt.
The movie was more of a romantic movie rather than a thriller. The love story is touched on within like 15 minutes into the film and the characters establish that there is something more than friendship here. The parts with death were really great, that sounds weird but it’s true. Whenever a character was in trouble you got sort of nervous and you knew they couldn’t die already but for some reason, you thought: “Maybe they will die, is this the end?”
After the film, I left with a feeling of confusion and slight dissatisfaction. I’ll admit it: I kinda wanted someone to die. I wanted to feel something else besides fear for the character, I wanted to feel the loneliness that the movie endorsed in the trailer. No one has really been talking about the film and no one seemed interested in seeing the film, the theater had roughly 20-30 people.
If you’re looking for a film about love and overcoming the hardships of nature, then this is the film for you. But if you’re looking for a film that makes you feel lonely and makes you appreciate the little things you have, then The Mountain Between Us” is not the film for you.
Overall, the movie is a great, heartfelt love story with touches of deadly situations, teaching us the cliche moral that “love conquers all.” The reason I say this is because we have tons of movies that follow this idea, I mean like we get it, love is great and it’s so powerful. I want to hear like survival of the fittest or kill or be killed. I wanted something that separates this film from all the other romance movies.
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