It's not often that I see a preview that grabs me as much as the one for "127 Hours" did. Scenery straight out of a Road Runner cartoon, excitement, adventure, and... hey, wait a minute, this isn't about that guy who... oh crap, it IS about that guy.
Yes, THAT guy, the one who got trapped by a boulder while hiking in a remote area of Utah and cut off his own arm to free himself. I remember reading about him - his name is Aron Ralston -- when this happened in 2003. I also remember that not long after, I was in up to my elbow in the lint trap of my malfunctioning dryer (an exercise about as productive as staring into the open hood of a stalled car) when suddenly I realized that my arm was stuck. After a quick calculation of when anyone might come looking for me (not very soon) and the panicked recollection of Aron's story, I stopped dithering around trying to gently free myself and yanked my damn arm out with all the force I could muster. I was fine, of course, and only stuck for about a minute, but the point is, the story made quite an impression. How could it not have?
Aron (played by James Franco) has a really good time for the first twenty minutes of the film. He bikes out to a canyon, runs into a couple of girls, and spends an exhilarating ten minutes or so exploring with them. This is really the only enjoyable part of the movie - it's the part I saw in the preview that made me want to see it in the first place, and even more so, to go hiking in Utah.
Not long after the girls leave, a big rock dislodges and sends Aron tumbling into the canyon, trapping his right forearm against the wall when they both land. And I'm thinking crap, do I have to watch this guy just stand here for the next hour?
Pretty much, yah. After a few fruitless attempts to get free, Aron seems to resign himself to a slow death. He has very little food and not much water and no one has the slightest idea of where he is. He's brought along his video camera, which at least gives him an excuse to talk once in a while as he documents his ordeal. But most of his time is spent just sort of squinting in silence.
The only real action is when Aron takes an occasional sip out of his water bottle. These scenes are dramatically filmed from the point of view of a water molecule within the bottle, splishing and splashing its way towards Aron's mouth. There are also several flashbacks, the collective theme of which seems to be "Aron is kind of a dick", along several dream sequences.
All of this is building up to the point that we all know is coming, which we're cheering for and dreading at the same time. But even before Aron snaps both bones in his forearm and starts sawing through the soft tissue with the dull blade of an off-brand multi-purpose tool, he starts drinking his own urine (dramatically filmed from the point of view of a urine molecule), which actually made me queasier than amputation itself. This film is definitely not for the squeamish.
When you think about it, Aron Ralston's ordeal is just a terrible idea for a movie, because once he becomes trapped there's almost no dialogue (except for one time when Aron pretends to interview himself) and no action. But director Danny Boyle takes this really bad idea and runs with it and ends up making about the best possible movie you can make out of a story that's so utterly unfilmable. It's kind of like those "Iron Chef" competitions where the secret ingredient is something really vile like pickled eel and the iron chef whips it up into a mouse and wraps it in bacon until it becomes palatable.
This isn't to say that I liked "127 Hours". I actually kind of hated it after about the first twenty minutes. For a guy trapped in a canyon by a boulder, Aron is not a particularly sympathetic character. And I may be in the minority here, but James Franco does not have a face that I enjoy staring at for long stretches either.
Even the movie's flashbacks are kind of mundane. We see Aron not picking up when he hears his mother's call go to voicemail. We see him not going after an apparently pissed off girlfriend who leaves him at a football game. Boyle really doesn't have a lot to work with as he tries to turn this gruesome little survival story into something bigger: a grand tale of Aron's transformation. He used to be single, see, and now he's married. He used to NEVER tell people where he was going and now he ALWAYS tells them. He used to think he didn't need any help, but after being trapped in a canyon for 127 hours and cutting his own arm off, he actually yells for help. Wow, he's a changed man alright.
The thing is, no one really cares about this stuff anyway. The drawing card here is the forearm-ectomy, not that Aron's learned a valuable lesson. You can whip it up into a mousse and wrap it in bacon all you want, but this movie is still just about a guy who got trapped by a rock and cut his own arm off.
