So Danny Boyle tackles yet another genre, a real life fight for survival story with the tagline 'there is no force more powerful than the will to live'. It brings to mind one of my favourite films/documentaries 'Touching the Void', a true story about a man who has a climbing accident and through his own unstoppable determination manages to crawl for miles with a completely broken leg back to base camp. The story is endearing and powerful but it’s told in a documentary style with talking heads and superb dramatisations. Touching The Void is a triumph because it comes straight from the mouths of the people who actually went through it. 127 Hours is brave in taking a true story that is recent, can be well documented by the real Aron Ralston and instead dramatising it. With the story focusing solely on one person doing something daft, it's easy to see why this was given the feature film treatment, the film has one focus with James Franco playing the central role brilliantly, but for me it never reaches the heady heights of Touching the Voids honesty and compassion. A friend of mine watched an interview with Aron Ralston describing his escape before seeing the film and felt his experience at the cinema was enhanced due to this. After seeing the film for myself I couldn't help but feel that this kind of insight would have given the film more connection with the fact that this actually happened.
However this is not to say that 127 Hours is a bad film, far from it. To anyone not privy to the story of Aron Ralston this will be an inspiring and excruciating ride into a man’s psyche and his willingness to live. The performance and the way that it is captured through various experimental camera techniques are astonishing. It’s not a film for the faint of heart, when it was first shown people were given t-shirts shirts saying 'I kept my eyes open for all of 127 Hours' and in all fairness I did flinch a few times myself as Aron went about his escape. Even though the event that see's Aron free himself from his prison weighs heavily in the plot of the film, 127 Hours proves what The Kings Speech proved, that characters mean much more to the film than anything else. James Franco brings Aron Ralston to life and really goes hell for leather. He's totally believable as a free spirited and outgoing . . . tit, and as his characters pluckiness and foolishness is worn down by the struggle he's landed himself in and responds with a performance that doesn't feel forced or fake.
One of the main crux of the story are Arons flash backs and hallucinations that represent his thoughts, fears and dreams as he slowly deteriorates. For much of the film they help the audience to understand what is going through Arons head and why he eventually comes to this disturbing but inevitable conclusion. The images never spell their meaning but they don't have to as they ultimately serve in making Aron realise that his attitude and total lack of responsibility have lead him to this crack in the wilderness. It's a sour note especially one that paints the protagonist as a bit of an idiot, but this never becomes a sticking point in the enjoyment of the film. In fact it gives you better connection to the character, none of us are perfect, we all have our flaws and the best characters in movie history are flawed in their own unique way.
To conclude 127 Hours is like nothing you've seen before, you've all seen survival movies and they do paint the same picture every time, not here. Like I say it’s not for the faint of heart, but for those who want to see real sacrifice and triumph in the face of impossible circumstances then this is what you’re after.
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