127 Hours

SO what’s 127 Hours about? That man who cut off his own arm with a penknife.

The subject from Danny Boyle, Oscar-winning director of Slumdog Millionaire, sounds unwatchable. Who, you might reasonably ask, wants to watch someone mutilate himself?

That there’s much more to 127 Hours than this is testament to Boyle’s skills as a film-maker and those of his Slumdog and Full Monty writer Simon Beaufoy.

This never feels like a film with just one character and one location for much of its running time. It’s a fully-rounded study of a man with the courage and determination to literally extricate himself from an apparently hopeless situation.

Climber Aron Ralston’s memoir Between A Rock And A Hard Place is the basis for the film which sketches in his background and journey – on a mountain bike, meeting a couple of travellers (Kate Mara and Amber Tamlyn) and taking a dip in a subterranean rock pool. Then he’s on his own in the Blue John Canyon in Utah, an area as lonely as it is beautiful. He slips while climbing, falls into a canyon and is left pinned against the wall, his arm trapped by a heavy boulder. With little water and equipment, he survives for over five days. Then he thinks the unthinkable, that the only way he’s ever going to survive is to cut off his trapped arm. It’s a hard scene to watch but never gratuitous and, by that time, you’re willing Ralston on to escape, thanks to actor James Franco, who doesn’t so much play Aron Ralston as become him. Come Oscar time, Boyle and his collaborators could well be claiming prizes again.