Cecil says: A moving trip to the cinema for us as this was our last visit to the wonderful Roxy Cinema in Nowra before our move away from New South Wales. The film was gripping, but not as moving as the feeling of this being our last trip to Nowra.
The plot boils down to Kate Winslet and Idris Elba getting
stuck at a US airport because of an impending storm, but Alex (Winslet) having
the guile to get the two of them onto a private plane to get to their
destination. Trouble is the guy who’s flying the plane has a heart attack and
the plane comes down on a snowy mountain peak, and the two survivors (Winslet and
Elba) plus pilot’s dog, spend most of the rest of the film trying to get down
from the mountain in one piece.
The dog has only a minor role, though it does get into
scrapes itself as it comes face to face with a cougar and seems to get itself
lost at inconvenient times – and then reappears out of the blue in a way that
made me wonder if something got lost on the cutting room floor. I’m not even
sure really what the dog adds to the plot, or why the script writer felt it was
needed.
Surely there was enough to get your teeth into dealing just
with the Winslet/Elba relationship as it developed, though I’m not sure the
chemistry between the two protagonists really worked on the screen. Was that a
casting issue? Or just that the film didn’t really get inside what exactly made
these two bond. Sure, helping each other survive will often bring two humans
closer than anything else can, but I just didn’t believe in the ‘love’ that developed
between these two.
The idea of getting down a mountain alive has been done
before (there was the film years ago about the survivors of the Chilean plane
crash in the Andes) and this film did a nice job of raising some of the
dilemmas you’d face if it happened to you. And most of it felt believable.
But I couldn’t help thinking, when they reached the house
half way down, there would have been a clearer track to get to the house. Otherwise
how would the people who built it in the first place have got the materials up
there? So any dramas and near-death experiences from that moment on felt a
little bit far-fetched.
The film was engaging, though, and gave us enough ammunition
for a good post-film post-mortem.
***
Bea says: Yes, I agree mostly with Cecil on this one – a willing
suspension of disbelief was certainly required.
However, I don’t mind the survivor genre, as I quite like to think about
what I would do in the situation. In
this film, Kate Winslet’s character took a lot of risks, and Idris Elba’s was
too cautious, which I think was supposed to provide the chemistry between them
(it didn’t).
I did think that perhaps the characters might have looked a
bit more – unwashed – in the sex scene, and that they also might have looked
colder and more uncomfortable as the cabin had holes in the roof and poor
heating, and they had not eaten for a while…. perhaps I’m getting old, but I
don’t think I’d have looked as glamorous as Winslet did in the same
situation. But I did try to suspend that
disbelief as disaster followed disaster as they descended the mountain.
What this film did better, for about the last ten minutes,
was examine how hard it is to fit back into normal life and society after a
life-changing experience like surviving a plane crash in a remote location, and
although the ending was a bit romantic and twee, it satisfied me. Winslet and Elba both did what they could with
this film, and were able to make it watchable.
**.5
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