“Everything we get out of this movie (save for the ending) is good, there is just too much of it.”

I had been looking forward to seeing The Mountain Between Us for some time, but because of life and stuff I only got the chance yesterday. The Mountain Between Us is (or at least I thought it was) a movie about two people who get stranded on a mountain and have to work together to survive. The film stars Idris Elba and Kate Winslet, and that’s about it. You know what you’re getting into when you watch the trailer. Oh, and if this review seems out of character for me it’s because I’m on a veritable cocktail of cold medicine, and my head is pretty foggy. Even typing this intro proved to be a laborious task, so let’s see how the rest of this goes.

The biggest problem I had with The Mountain Between Us was the fact that it has a very ‘hurry up and wait’ mentality. It takes no time at all to get you to the real meat of the movie, unfortunately the meat of the movie is pretty bland. I’m not necessarily upset because I knew what I was getting into, but I don’t think this movie had the right to be 2 hours long. There was just a whole lot of nothing going on for the most part. And this sounds hypocritical to me because one of my favourite movies is Cast Away (which is also a movie where nothing really happens), but for some reason The Mountain Between Us just didn’t resonate with me on the same level as Cast Away. Sure I was attached to the characters, but not much of this movie seemed like there was any consequence. For example, The Mountain Between Us lacked one thing a survival movie should have in spades: danger. Sure every once in a while we would be reminded that it’s cold out and they could die at any minute, but the movie also did a good (bad) job of making us forget this fact. Any problem that presented itself seemed to be solved in record time, and this took all of the fun out of the survival aspect of this film. So if you take the survival aspect out of a survival film, what do you have? Well apparently, as the title of the film and the ending suggests, The Mountain Between Us isn’t a survival story but a love story. The only question I have is this: If The Mountain Between Us is a love story, why spend so much fucking time on the mountain? You can’t present a movie wherein two main characters get trapped on a mountain and have to survive and then at the end go “Oh ya, and it was a love story too”. Make up your fucking mind. And this ruins the ending of the film because it feels so fucking tacked on. We have this thirty minute wrap-up that means nothing because it is tackling a completely separate issue from the rest of the film. I will admit that it was cool to see someone who was competent (a doctor) in a survival situation, and I did like the performances of the two main actors, but overall The Mountain Between Us just kind of fell flat for me.

Overall The Mountain Between Us is a survival movie that kind of forgets that toward the end. Everything we get out of this movie (save for the ending) is good, there is just too much of it. I would say it is worth checking out for the performances alone.

I give The Mountain Between Us a B