What I wasn’t anticipating was this movie slowly transforming into a type of love story. She’s on her way to get married he’s got an emergency surgery both miss their appointments. The first time he leaves her for an extended period to get a better view and possibly a cell phone signal, she is attacked by a cougar that manages to get into their nicely fortified and insulated plane remnants.Īs films like this often do, we witness Alex and Ben get to know each other a bit better and discover what makes them tick. The survivalist scenarios are terrific, and the way this pair looks out for each other, playing to their strengths and knowledge of biology and tactics for staying warm and safe. Much like the ill-fated flight that opens the film, The Mountain Between Us starts strong, cruises along at a serviceable altitude, and then comes crashing down in the end. And oh yeah, they have to take care of the pilot’s dog as well, who I grew to hate with a passion by the end of the film. With Alex’s leg severely injured and Ben, the sensible one, less inclined to leave the wreckage, the first struggle is with each other to figure out whether to risk walking into the unknown or staying and hoping for the best.

Photojournalist Alex (Kate Winslet) and surgeon Ben (Idris Elba) manage to find a small charter plane (flown by a crusty old pilot played by Beau Bridges) to take them to a city where they can get the flights they need to get home.īut the plane goes down in the middle of a snow-covered mountain range, and they are stranded with little hope of being rescued, since the pilot didn’t file a flight plan and the emergency beacon in the tail of the plane was smashed in the crash.

This film begins with a pair of strangers that share a common dilemma: they are stranded in an airport, desperate to get where they are going without having to wait with the masses. I’m not so much talking about movies involving insane weather phenomena I’m looking at films that feature more believable conflicts, such as this week’s The Mountain Between Us, where people are dropped into an environment in which it is virtually impossible to survive, and they still attempt to get out against all the odds. (Full disclosure: there’s another, better example of this coming out this week in some places called Walking Out, starring Matt Bomer.) Kate Winslet and Idris Elba in The Mountain Between Us

And even though I’m fully aware that nature, by all rights, should win every time, if a human comes out of a fight like that alive, it’s usually because nature lets them win. I’ve always been a sucker for filmed stories about humans vs.

The mountain between us book review