Idris Elba and Kate Winslet have a really unpleasant air travel experience in the trailer for The Mountain Between Us, director Hany Abu-Assad’s adaptation of Charles Martin’s novel, from a screenplay by Chris Weitz and J. Mills Goodloe. The main takeaway from the trailer: Things are going to be very, very cold. Elba plays a doctor due to perform surgery, Winslet is a bride-to-be, and both of their characters are just desperate enough to get home that they ignore the primary rule of air travel: Never take a private plane over snow-covered mountains unless you’re looking for an excuse to resort to cannibalism.
Which, on the evidence of the trailer, neither Elba nor Winslet are. There’s lots of wilderness-survival footage, but no shots of, say, Elba’s gaze lingering over the frozen body of the pilot until Winslet catches him looking. The voice-over explains why neither Elba nor Winslet’s cell phones are working, but there’s no explanation for these two characters seemingly passing up the once-in-a-lifetime chance to go full cannibal without facing any social stigma. Still, despite this plot hole, The Mountain Between Us looks like it will deliver solid incredibly-attractive-people-vs.-nature thrills. For the other stuff, there’s always Alive.
