The best thing about writing a review of 127 Hours is that I don't have to include a spoiler warning. If you're going to see the movie, based on the true-life survival story of climber Aron Ralston, you probably already know that it involves watching a dude amputate his own arm after five days pinned under a boulder at the bottom of a canyon.
The clever thing about the movie is that it uses this foreknowledge to its advantage. In the film's opening montage, completely quotidian snippets of Ralston's pre-hiking routine--filling a water bottle, fumbling around for a Swiss Army knife--vibrate with tension, because we know what's coming. In the first act, director Danny Boyle (who has hereby redeemed himself from the spectacularly improbable and wildly overrated Slumdog Millionaire) plays with this tension with an almost sadistic glee, faking us out with trips and spills until we reach the final, fateful slot canyon in which man and boulder meet.
A movie where the protagonist spends two-thirds of his screen time alone, immobilized, in a single location, is the kind of thing that tends to get described as "unfilmable." And yet 127 Hours doesn't have a slow microsecond in it. If the movie were a person, it would have 0% body fat. The film zips through its hour-and-forty-minute running time with a frenetic energy that mirrors its protagonist, a happy-go-lucky daredevil so overconfident, or self-absorbed, that he thought nothing of going on a solo hike in a remote area without telling anyone where he was going to be.
Much of the credit for keeping the film moving goes to James Franco's exceptional performance, and the smart, deftly-written script he has to work with. In the middle of a landscape of epic proportions, his character's journey is really all interior, and he takes us through it with a naturalistic performance that never feels overwrought in the most dramatic of circumstances. But equally important is Boyle's willingness to slip effortlessly between reality and Aron's thoughts, dreams, memories, fantasies and hallucinations, creating a highly subjective landscape in which we're maybe as close to being inside someone's head as you can get in a movie. Never again will you take things like water and sunlight for granted in quite the same way.
After hearing all the hype about the amputation scene, I was bracing for something stomach-churning. While it's certainly very bloody, I didn't feel it was unnecessarily drawn-out. It's true that I have a fairly high tolerance for gore, but honestly, there was never a moment I wanted to look away--because the filmmakers had successfully made me care enough about the character that I wanted to see if he could do it. I think this is a very important point about showing any kind of violence or pain on screen: the more invested we are in the characters, the more likely it is to feel earned and not gratuitous. I kept watching because I was rooting for him, and I wasn't the only one. When the amputation is complete and Ralston finds himself suddenly, finally, separated from the boulder that's been his nemesis for the past five days, the audience in the screening I went to cheered. It wasn't the reaction I was expecting, but it was pretty awesome.
In fact, the dominant feeling the film leaves you with is one of euphoria, the pure joy of seeing someone triumph in a seemingly impossible situation and get another chance at life. Here we have a perpetual limit-pusher, an adrenaline junkie who is always flirting with the prospect of death until the day a real life-or-death scenario meets him smack in the face. And, when push comes to shove, he finds himself not only equal to the challenge, but humbler and wiser for it. Even if you're the kind of movie-goer who's not sure you can handle the arm-severing scene, this is one that's worth pushing your own limits for.
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