Lost on a Mountain in Maine

My wife and I were looking for a pleasant, not difficult movie to watch after our usual Saturday steak and wine dinner. We found this one streaming on Peacock. We enjoyed the viewing.

It is a dramatization of events from the summer of 1939. A family had been planning a fishing trip but dad had to change plans because of work. So instead he took his twin sons on a hiking trip up one of the mountains in Maine.

One of the twins, Donn, was the headstrong one of the two. He was more likely to get angry and perhaps do things he wasn't supposed to. As they are hiking, led by a friend who was experienced there, the weather started to become threatening. Instead of agreeing to go back with the others he took off on his own, confident that he would be OK.

So the movie is about his survival, lost on the mountain for at least 9 or 10 days, I lost count. Search parties turned up nothing, his family started to fear the worst. But his dad had always told him, if you find a stream follow it because it will lead you to a river and you could follow that.

A nice touch is the movie interspersed with interviews with family and friends apparently made in the 1990s. Plus even some low quality B&W news footage from 1939.

This is pretty plain movie but well made and tells an interesting story.

I liked the movie. I think it is well done. The acting is good beside the mother. Absolutely incapable of acting one single emotion, which kind of degrades the movie, but beside her, the others did it well. I am always amazed at kids that can act. Specialy kids of today. They are usually so pressured because of social media, I haven't seen any good acting since this movie. I don't know how the actress who plays the mother got the job though. Come on... all she could do is smirk. Anybody can do that. The hardest part to watch was when she should be sad that her son is lost... how in the hell did she get the job in the first place... change career woman, you're too uptight for this.

Why this went to theaters is beyond me. Bad acting, bad cinematography, and the director should have researched Maine Wildlife cause we don't have giant millipedes nor jungle birds. Pretty sure the majority of the film wasn't even filmed in Maine. Now as for the story, severely altered from the truth, and aside from the search it just follows a boy walking through the forest, nothing exciting or dramatic. Frankly the whole film was quite boring. They should have gotten Ron Howard to direct, maybe he could have put some life into the film. Direct to Streaming was all this film deserved and that's being generous.

Story based on a true event when in 1939 a kid is with his family trying to climb Mt. Katahdin but they all wimp out and the kid gets pissed and runs off, only to get lost for 9 days in the wilds.

Sad to say this is a long, dreary film with amateurish acting. There are some old interviews with people involved and even some actual newsreel footage when the kid is saved. But the story is badly told. If I remember right, this premiered this past summer at the Maine International Film Festival in Waterville.

For me the real cheat is that the entire film, despite the title, was made in Upstate New York and some Katahdin shots were actually just a model of the mountain in a studio. There's also stock aerial footage. No Maine. The family was actually from Rye, NY and only summered in Maine a few years.

Also, there's all this baloney "lore" about the Indian spirit that haunts Katahdin, which I never heard before in my life. It could be true, I suppose.

Good story, badly told.

I loved that clips of people portraited by these actors were interspersed into the film.

The director has a keen eye and it is obvious that he is a student of great film. Instead of critiquing the acting, light, sound, cinematography etc... of the film I found myself quickly immersed in the story. Always the sign of a great film.

I found myself comparing the boys relationships with their parents to my own relationships with my own daughters. This film brought out more emotion in me than I expected.

My hat goes off to the cast and crew, especially the director who it seems has really stepped up and hit a home run at such an early mark in his career.