The first frames of Danny Boyle's new film 127 Hours are frenetic montages of colour and movement and people and energy. You're not immediately sure why you're being fed these energy bars of high-voltage action, but you acknowledge, man, it's a rush.
It clicks into place when we're introduced to the movie's protagonist, outdoorsman/engineer Aron Ralston (James Franco), who is raring to go trekking in the Blue John Canyon in Utah. Climbing a mountain, rappelling through vertiginous gorges, cycling in uninhabited landscapes – these are solitary activities that inject pure adrenalin into the veins. It's an abstract high, but director Danny Boyle sets the tone via the opening imagery, which captures that buzz.
In a career-defining performance, Franco conveys it all — the addiction to this buzz; the truckloads of youthful charm, energy and verve; as well as its corollary, a careless selfishness and belief in his own invulnerability.
So Aron goes off on his hike, and along the way meets Kristi (Kate Mara) and Megan (Amber Tamblyn), two young women who are lost. They have a great together, and when they part ways, the girls invite him to a party. But his careless bonhomie makes them remark, “I don't think we figured in his day at all.”
Franco plays Aron with a cheerful, almost dizzying kinetic energy, that's all the more effective when put to an abrupt stop by the boulder that wedges his arm against the rock wall. Boyle — aided by directors of photography, Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak — determinedly keeps us in the canyon with Aron. Yet he also leads us out of it by getting into Aron's head and his memories/hallucinations about his former girlfriend (Clémence Poésy) and his parents (Kate Burton and Treat Williams).
A particularly effective sequence, poignant yet funny, has Aron tape his plight on his video camera, in the format of a talk show. He comes to the inescapable question that he alone is responsible for his present situation, chiefly by not telling anyone where he was going — a screw-up that he succinctly sums up with the single sound: “Oops.”
Thus Aron's ultimate insight is not only the terrible steps he must take to survive, but also the recognition of a grown-up version of himself that understands accountability.
The name of the movie tells you the length of the ordeal, and as everyone knows — specially after the Oscar buzz — the movie is based on the real-life Aron Ralston's experiences in April 2003, chronicled in his memoir “Between a Rock and a Hard Place”. A special point of interest for us in Tamil Nadu is the double Oscar nomination scored again by A. R. Rahman for his work on the film — for best original score and best original song, ‘If I Rise'.
As with Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting , Boyle creates in 127 Hours , a movie that is almost too harrowing to watch in parts, but peculiarly enough, winds up being an intensely life-affirming experience.
127 Hours
Genre: Drama
Director: Danny Boyle
Cast: James Franco
Storyline: When an accident traps outdoorsman Aron Ralston under a boulder in the uninhabited Utah canyons, he must figure out a way to survive.
Bottomline: Boyle proves again his ability to find life-affirming poetry amid the more horrific aspects of life
