127 Hours

A True Life-Changing Experience

The Story:

127 Hours centers on Aron Ralston (James Franco), an American climber whose arm got trapped under a boulder while hiking in Canyonlands National Park in Utah. He has to find a way to free himself, while in the other hand has to survive with little food and water, and the difficulty to move and rest because of his trapping position.

After struggling and waiting help for five days, Ralston decided that the only chance he had for survival was to amputate his own right arm. It was not an easy process, as he hadn’t brought proper tools for self-surgery.

Release Date: January 28, 2011 (wide)
Distributor: Fox Searchlight Pictures
Directed by: Danny Boyle (The Beach, Sunshine, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire)
Starring: James Franco, Kate Mara, Amber Tamblyn
Budget: $18,000,000
Gross Revenue: $18,329,466 (USA) and $57,547,568 (worldwide)

Review:

I don’t really know how to write a review for this movie without giving any spoiler for the plot. In fact, because this film is based on a real event, you’d probably already know the story and how it ends.

It’s a story of Aron Ralston, an energetic and a little bit arrogant young man who alwalys live to the fullest. One day, he decided to adventuring the Canyonlands National Park in Utah, a place that he considers as his second home. In his journey, Ralston went through a narrow passage where boulders are suspended, wedged between the walls of rock. As he descends, one boulder is jarred loose, falling after Ralston to the bottom of the canyon and pinning his right arm against the canyon wall, trapping him. After trying numerous ways to freed himself, he then realize that the only way left is to cut his own arm with a dull knife!

The movie starts with a brief introduction to Aron Ralston character. How he loves challange, including hiking and climbing. When he met with two beautiful travelers who got lost in the canyon, he gladly help them and invited them to the exotic part of the canyon that only a few people know. Those events will show Aron’s true personality, an important aspect to understand his behaviour when he got stuck from the boulder later.

The arm-stuck part is the core of the movie. You won’t only see Ralston’s attemp to free himself, but also how he spent his lonely time for around 5 days. Exhausted, lack of food and water, these make Aron starting to halucinate. This is probably the part of the movie that might bore you, even if only for a while. In the other hand, those events also come with flashbacks that make the audience understand about Aron’s past. The one man act movie and the psychological aspect of being alone with only few hopes left will remain you of Tom Hanks in Cast Away (2000).

Finally, come the best and scariest part of the entire film, the one where Ralston had to perform self-surgery to cut his right arm, just below the elbow. Director Danny Boyle chose to desribe the surgery process with details, makes it unsuitable for the faint-heart. How Aron had to break his bone first, than cut slowly through skin and flesh with dull knife, and cut the nerves that gives extraordinary pain, they all look so real that even made some viewers reported unconscious in theatre.

As usual, Danny Boyle has been succeeded in making a low-budget movie into Oscar quality and money-machine one, as we’ve seen in 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire. The camera angle and his decision to not use many special effects give the humane touch for 127 Hours. Even though, his job won’t became this perfect if not because James Franco. His role could very easily have become showy and overly dramatic, but he managed to kept it so natural. The 33-year-old actor made his lifetime performance which granted him his first Academy Award Nomination for Best Actor.

My Rating: A-

IMDb user rating: 7.9/10

Rotten Tomatoes meter: 93%

Metacritic: 84/100

Yahoo! critics: A-

Yahoo! users: A-

Your Ratings: (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Note that ratings and gross revenue are based from when this review was written, so the values might already changed by now.