Barnum and Bailey combined could not deliver the same showbiz impact as Danny Boyle on a good day, and with 127 Hours he’s having one of the best.
This is his tremendously crafted new movie. It turns on an act of horrible violence, and yet it doesn’t feel like a horror film or a violent one. It is based, as they say, on a true story, a claim that is usually the prelude to a fantastically dishonest array of evasions and slippery half-truths. Not here.
Though there are a few minor embellishments, Boyle sticks to the facts. Or rather the fact, the single, inexhaustibly astonishing fact.
In 2003 Aron Ralston was a climber and extreme sports enthusiast who went out hiking in the beautiful, remote Blue John Canyon in Utah. He had told no one where he was going; he had no mobile phone and wouldn’t be able to get a signal anyway.
He is here swaggeringly self-confident and on even more of an endorphin rush than usual after an encounter with two attractive women hikers who appear to be sizing up the possibility of abseiling into his pants at the party they’re throwing later that night.
Ralston’s date with destiny begins when he starts a very dangerous canyon climb and his arm gets jammed, immovably, under a colossal boulder. He is trapped. But Ralston has a small pocketknife with him and now faces some tough choices about what he will have to leave behind. By sawing through his arm with his knife, it should be possible to get out of there in most of one piece. Three-and-a-half limbs out of four isn’t bad.
The great thing about the title is that it does not merely refer to the duration of Ralston’s ordeal — it is specifically the length of time needed for him, mentally, to confront the reality of what he must now do. As played by James Franco, Ralston is pig-headed and conceited but also intelligent and likable.
You feel for him and feel with him. I think the compelling thing about 127 Hours is that it has no message, it has no metaphorical meaning. Aron Ralston one day cut his own arm off. And that’s it. His choice was as terrible and unavoidable as the fact of death itself, which Ralston’s magnificent survival has not modified one iota.
Visually, Boyle’s film is compelling and there is a poetry in Ralston’s vulnerable, fragile flesh being crushed under the weight of a landmass trillions of years in the making. It is an exciting, touching film, which Boyle brings off with enormous skill. It’s a skill for which lesser directors would give their — Well, they’d give an awful lot. — Guardian News & Media