movie review: 127 hours

Even though I knew that eventually I would have to watch a man cut off his own arm, I was still very excited to see James Franco play Aron Ralston in director Danny Boyle’s (of Slumdog Millionaire) movie 127 Hours. I had heard enough about the events that this movie was based on in the news, and enough hype from the movie community about Franco’s performance that I was definitely intrigued. After all, the basic concept seems cool enough: a mountain climber becomes trapped under a boulder while canyoneering alone in the desert and goes to extreme measures to survive: he must cut off his own arm using a dull pocket knife and climb out of the crevasse and back to civilization.
James Franco did a marvelous job of contrasting a cocky, daredevil adventurer with a sensitive and reflective young man staring at a crossroads in his life. The character is stubborn but totally likeable. The rollercoaster of human emotion and sanity that Franco takes the audience on is one worth riding. Given the fact that the audience spends much of the film a foot away from Franco’s face, I thought the fact that I stayed totally engaged in the film was a testament to director Danny Boyle’s ability to tell a great story and Franco’s incredibly convincing acting skills. The audience is immediately transported to the crevasse that Franco is stuck in and stays there with him until the brutal but heroic end. The film does an expert job of representing the full 127 hours that Franco’s character had to spend stuck under a rock because it showed that that is exactly the amount of time that had to pass before a man could reach the level of desperation required to cut off his own limb. In addition, by the time Franco’s character is ready to lose the arm, the audience is prepared as well.
Danny Boyle’s ability to captivate an audience is truly exemplified in this film because even though I knew Franco’s character would survive and escape his, at times, very dire situation, I was on pins and needles until the very emotional end of the movie. The only thing I was unclear about was the message or moral of this story. I wondered if, based on the way in which Boyle told the story, he meant to imply that this experience made Ralston a better, more humble person that is now more willing to ask for help, or if he just wanted to tell this troubling story in an artistic way, open to audience interpretation. The movie is visually very stunning thanks to the both the location of the story and the skillful cinematography, which helps build the reality of the plot for the audience, but the message I took away from the movie was still very simple: human beings will do extreme things to ensure their own survival. Boyle and Franco convey this very basic idea in a moving and very entertaining way in 127 Hours.