REVIEW: 127 Hours

RARE COURAGE

After creating a sensation with Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle could  either have gone bigger, or made something totally unexpected. He has done the latter. It takes courage and confidence to make a film about a man trapped in a canyon for 127 hours.  The real life story of Aron Ralston (James Franco) is known, since he wrote a book (Between a Rock and a Hard Place) about it.  Most viewers probably know what happens in the end, and how he gets out, but still, you watch hoping that he will escape unharmed, since he is so brave. 

Obviously, there has to be much more than just his desperate attempts at survival, with the pain, fear, lack of food and water.  Boyle takes his mind out the cave so to say, with hallucinations, flashbacks and premonitions, and sporadic shots of the breathtaking rocky landscape.  After a point, it does get a bit boring to watch Franco’s plight, but at the same time, Boyle (with the help of the cinematographers Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak, and music composer AR Rahman) creates tension and claustrophobia so intense, that the viewer starts feeling it too.  It is scary and harrowing to watch, despite Ralston’s sense of humour (he video shoots a lot and at one point he interviews himself comically) and Franco’s terrific, Oscar-nominated performance.  The end is gory and very few maybe able to watch it without flinching and averting their eyes...if this was fiction, it would have been unbelievable. It is for stories like this that they say truth is stranger than fiction.