127 Hours - movie review

One Friday in April, 2003, Aron Ralston raced home from work, gathered his gear, jumped in his truck and fled the city. Nothing particularly unusual about this: Ralston was just another weekend warrior driven to escape civilisation, exchanging man-made canyons for the real thing. As usual Aron didn't tell anyone where he was going – that would defeat the purpose of his flight. The plan: biking, hiking and climbing exploration in the Blue John Canyon, a portion of the sprawling and ancient network within Canyonlands National Park, Utah. Things didn’t exactly work out that way, but they rarely do in extraordinary tales of human endeavour. As such survivalist stories go, Ralston’s ranks up there with best.

A carefree, 27-year old adrenaline junkie, Ralston was something of a loner, happy to forgo family and society for the most part in favour of the pursuit of his other interests, specifically weekends just like this. Nothing particularly out of ordinary, the world is full of such singular people. Very few though face so profoundly a life and death situation as to question what would they would do if faced with the unthinkable? Is the will to live programmed into our DNA?

These are central concerns of 127 Hours, Danny Boyle’s adaptation of Ralston’s own memoir Between A Rock And A Hard Place. It is the first time Boyle has taken on screenwriting duties, sharing credit with Simon Beaufoy who wrote Slumdog Millionaire. Indeed, 127 Hours shares much with the Oscar-winning shaggy dog story: A.R. Rahman returns to score original music, so too cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle. As a result, the stylistic fingerprints of Slumdog spill over in 127 Hours, yet there is more to it than this and one can’t help but think of Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust For Life’ playing over a certain Scottish film about heroin addicts. No doubt, there are thematic parallels to be drawn.

Boyle draws visual comparisons to help us make the transition. From the crowded allyways of Bombay, 127 Hours wildly energetic, split-screen opening introduces us to all the crowded hotspots of the world, people everywhere going about their business. Instead of Iggy Pop it’s Free Blood (‘Never Hear Surf Music Again’), lyrics wondering out loud: “There must be some kind of chemical / makes us different from the animals.”

Walking talking Gatorade advert Ralston (James Franco) hits the road overnight, sleeping in his truck so to use every moment of sunlight Saturday has to offer. Freewheeling toward his destiny he meets a couple of girls and shows them a good time, canyon style, before making off. They’re stunned by the experience as we are. Then fate plays its card, or in this case a boulder that, as Ralston observes, waited millions of years for him to come along.

Twenty minutes into the film, cue title. It’s a brilliant quip by Boyle, recognising everything before is merely prologue.

So how do you turn a story about a guy with one arm trapped against the wall at the bottom of a cravasse into a movie? First things first, you get James Franco to play the guy. The actor-daytime soap star-poet-academic-model is at his charmismatic best here, never out-acting the story or script. Understated, empathetic and completely magnetic as he explores the range of mental states Ralston experiences during his five-day internment. Franco has talent in spades and has never been better than he is here.

Equal to the task is Boyle and his collaborators who are never afraid to turn this seemingly limited cinematic canvas into something pyrotechnic. The result is profoundly life-affirming, cliché though that may be. It doesn’t come cheap, you have to earn it as an auroma of sickening anticipation builts and builds until the moment you walked into the cinema fearing finally arrives. No matter how sweaty or faint it makes you, think yourself lucky it wasn’t you who had to snap your own forearm and cut your synaptic nerve with a pair of pliers.

Ralston makes use of everything at his disposal to survive: rope, plastic bags, precious water reserves, a video camera to record his thoughts, and, of course, that multitool. Likewise, Boyle uses every storytelling device from flashbacks to hallucinations to explore a man in this very particular moment of self-discovery. It’s impossible to truly appreciate what Ralston endured. Alone, knowing no-one knew where he was, that his absence wouldn’t even be noticed until he was long dead – such things likely never leave you.

If life and how we live it is defined by the choices we make, then 127 Hours represents a moment of Darwinism personified and Danny Boyle a filmmaker with his finger pressed firmly against the pulse of human potential.