127 Hours (2010)
Directed by Danny Boyle
The true story of mountain climber Aron Ralston's remarkable adventure to save himself after a fallen boulder crashes on his arm and traps him in an isolated canyon in Utah.
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27 films that influenced 127 Hours
What critics say influenced 127 Hours
But compared to hapless Chris McCandless, who walked "Into the Wild" and never walked out, "127 Hours" has a happy ending, since the armless Ralston lived to tell about it.
As a portrait of youthful recklessness amidst the grandeur of indifferent nature, "127 Hours" may remind some viewers of Sean Penn's magnificent "Into the Wild," about a similarly brash young man on his own physically extreme journey.
The result is something akin to " Buried " meets "Into the Wild" -- and, odd as it seems, it's every bit as beautiful as it is harrowing.
Unlike Chris McCandless of “Into the Wild,’’ he’s not propelled by discontent or an unhappy childhood but by the sheer joy of being out in the world.
Naturally, the film is a survivalist's tale, but Boyle digs deeper and, similar to Sean Penn's deeply affecting Into The Wild, this is also a stirring exploration of a cocky independent spirit who becomes painfully aware of the inadequacy of his lone-wolf mentality when it comes to surviving in the wilderness.
Echoes of Into the Wild, Jeremiah Johnson, and the occasional Bear Grylls episode.
But at this point in Mr. Boyle’s career, it’s mind-boggling to see him paying random homage to Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy” during a fantasy sequence.
The manner in which Boyle stages and Franco portrays his eventual march to the first people he has seen in five days is reminiscent of George Bailey's triumphant run through Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life and no less powerful.
One sequence, in which Ralston narrates the action as if hosting a talk show, complete with a laugh track, seems lifted from one of the lesser moments of Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers.”
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What that usually means is something closer to the politics of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, tailored for simplistic American ideas about individualism: rugged men alone in rugged mountains, performing amazing feats of self-discipline and self-sacrifice, blah blah blah.
With roots in everything from Jack London’s 1908 short story “To Build a Fire” to the 2003 nonfiction film “Touching the Void” and the recent ordeal of the Chilean miners, “127 Hours” is a real-life cautionary tale for anyone not respectful of all the dirty tricks Mother Nature can play.
Brief, punchy and powerful, 127 Hours has more than a passing similarity with the excellent 2003 documentary Touching the Void - about two men whose trip to the Andes goes bad - and will make you feel the tension, anxiety and anger Ralston went through.
A lot of movies about climbing ‒ I’m thinking “Touching the Void” and “North Face” ‒ are about men who get into trouble by pushing their luck.
Is it a uniquely powerful experience or a "Johnny-come-lately" after the metaphysical survivalist films Touching the Void and Into the Wild?
Aron wanted to be interviewed a bit like in “Touching the Void”.
Boyle, in dramatizing Ralston’s ordeal, goes a very different route than Robert Zemeckis did in “Cast Away.”
Alas, Boyle's awareness of his chosen style's limitations isn't among his present strengths, and one wishes that he'd handed the spotlight over to the almost one-man-show that is James Franco (he's as good to this film as Tom Hanks was to the similar, superior Cast Away) about twice as much as he actually did.
Star James Franco has remarked that it had to be tougher playing Ralston than it was for Tom Hanks in "Cast Away" (2000).
At least in Cast Away Tom Hanks had an island to wander around and a beach ball to talk to.
While every other actor in the movie is a distant second to Franco in terms of screen time, Boyle is wise to prevent Aron’s predicament from resembling Tom Hanks in “Cast Away.”
127 Hours is as gripping a tale of stranded ingenuity as Cast Away, as Aron works to save himself by adjusting to his new reality.
Like Hitchcock tackling “Lifeboat,” Boyle approached “127 Hours” as a logistical challenge.
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Not for him the avant-garde broodiness of Gus Van Sant’s Gerry, or even the metaphysical speculations of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man: working alongside cinematographers Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak, he jazzes up proceedings with split screens, neo-psychedelic images, showy camera angles (one shot is taken from the perspective of an empty bottle, which Ralston’s tongue comes at like an angry lizard).
But Mother Nature is a fickle mistress and, as she has proven in other equally engrossing true-life tales such as "Grizzly Man" and "Into the Wild", she has a way of teaching a lesson to those who get too comfortable with her.
The soundtrack routinely goes from dead silence to pain-inducing, while Aron has flashes of memory, images of what could have been, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge style imaginary escapes, visions of large crowds of people in urban settings, premonitions of his future wife...why?