127 Hours
★★★★
(2010)
Danny Boyle’s much lauded crowd pleaser opened in the UK last week to gasps and cheers and a ton of gleaming reviews. The News of the World even wanted to give it 127 stars because that’s the type of over excited little hype puppy it is. Boyle, never one to choose easy stories has indeed honed his pop skills, his knack for mainstream, audience winning film making is growing and, even with a storyline you could write on the back on a pen knife, has again proven himself to be an endlessly creative and carefree director.
127 Hours tells a simple tale of a man who gets his arm caught under a rock in Canyon lands, Utah. There he stays for a long time, trapped, until he builds up enough courage, then, he pops his arm off with a blunt pen knife and heads into the sunset in a helicopter. There in lies the strange feeling you get when watching James Franco (in great form), playing real life survivor Aron Ralston, entertain notions of a self amputation. You know the ending. Everybody knows the ending…
What makes 127 Hours such a strangely compelling film is that the relief in tension in knowing what happens forces you instead to constantly ask yourself; “Could I do it?” and “Would I do it now?”, “..or now?”, “…or now?”
Boyle’s flashy techniques are fully on show here; we get sucked up a straw in Franco’s quickly depleting water, we are digitally taken up into Utah’s blue sky to show exactly how alone our character is within the landscape, we are propelled through the desert in 20 seconds on a sped up hand held camera, finally resting on a full bottle of Gatorade in the back of Ralston’s car. His thirst and discomfort are right at the surface of the film here and Boyle does exceptionally well in making you feel everything Ralston does, in glorious saturated colour.
However, Boyle also over amps the soundtrack using what seems like a thousand songs to varying degrees of effectiveness (mostly falling flat). The first 15 minutes of 127 Hours feels like a extreme sports music video, and back end of it forces feeling through music rather than relying on the atmosphere of the harrowing situation. The pop music working at it’s best when Bill Wither’s Lovely day kicks in contrasting Ralston’s descent into panic and starvation and at it’s worst as the Sigur Ros’ epic, Festival blasts over the films pretty strained finale.
Those few niggles aside, 127 Hours is a very entertaining piece of work, Franco is excellent and Anthony Dod Mantle once again shows us why he’s one of the worlds leading lens guys, the red and blues of the extremely beautiful Canyonlands are eye busting. It’s certainly an experience which will prime some great after movie beer conversations but sadly it falls way short of Touching the Void in story and power and misses wide of last years very good Buried in atmosphere, restraint and humor.
