I love a good survival film, but there just aren’t that many big budget ones made these days. Most of them end up being the cheap straight to video flicks that usually fail to offer much to entertain. The latest features a great cast including Idris Elba, Kate Winslet, Beau Bridges and Dermot Mulroney, but does it offer up that exciting survival aspect you expect or should have stayed on the mountain?

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The Mountain Between Us follows two strangers who must forge a connection to survive the extreme elements of a remote snow covered mountain after a tragic plane crash. 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. The trailers for this film lead you to believe that it is a survival film and while it is it wasn’t the film I thought I was going to get. I didn’t expect a full on action flick, but hoped for some exciting life threatening moments that would get the adrenaline going along with the character study of their fight to survive. While there are a couple of moments the majority of the film is really slow paced and is focused on just the two of them trying to live. Maybe I am jaded by Hollywood to expect something more, but I found myself underwhelmed by the entire affair.

 

Both Winslet and Elba are great here and have decent chemistry which is important for this film to work since 90% of it is just them and a dog. The dog is probably the most standout of the story though offering up a great amount of personality to a seemingly background character. They did something interesting here and played it up as more real life instead of action and excitement which would have been fine had there just been something more here. Instead we get a story more about them getting through their own life issues to survive both from the crash and their lives back home. Visually the movie is stunning to look at with the snowcapped mountain ranges becoming a character all its own and the one aspect that really made it stand out.

 

In the end this wasn’t a bad movie, but just one that left me feeling meh instead of excited. The plane crash itself is intense and I wish they had a bit more of this excitement sprinkled throughout as opposed to the ongoing personal drama, but at the same time this is more likely like what  would really be happening so who knows. If you want to give it a shot then just prepare for a slower paced film and you might get something more out of it.