Review of 127 Hours (2010) by Jiana W — 20 May 2012

Pretty good-- and gruesome. The cinematography is absolutely fantastic and gorgeous. The location is both beautiful and treacherous. Earlier in the movie it kind of felt like a commercial for an SUV with Aron's super-fast pedaling and bunny-hopping around rocks. But you get a great feel for what kind of guy Aron is and why/how he would eventually fall into this crazy situation. He's an adventurer, through and through. This is something he's probably done hundreds of times before but one moment is all it takes to change everything.

James Franco holds his own in the small list of one-man-show films, along with Will Smith and Tom Hanks. He keeps this situation interesting and engaging, which is good considering he's basically stuck behind a rock for nearly the entire movie. So they definitely had to pick the right person that people would want to watch, and I think they did here. The editing is really chaotic in this movie. Sometimes we get splitscreens of two scenes, sometimes we get three-way splitscreens. For some reason, Boyle uses footage of basketball arenas and sports fans and other commercial-like aspects of the film, including a product placement featuring orange Gatorade. I'm not quite sure what he was getting at but sometimes those edits could be irritating because of how hyper and chaotic they were.

Other than that, the film is really good with a great performance by James Franco. Unlike "Into The Wild", this film doesn't focus on making its protagonist an exceptional, faultless hero. There is a darkly humorous scene in which Ralston looks into his video camera and "interviews" himself on a morning talk show. During the "talk show", Ralston mocks his own hubris and decision to not tell anyone where he is going. The sequence seems to show him making light of his impending death until the very end when he quietly, sadly mutters to himself, "Oops." Ralston isn't a hero, and the movie never attempts to portray him as one. He's just a guy who got sick of waiting to die.

Worth a watch, although I had to steal peeks during the arm-cutting scene instead of watching it all the way through. *shudder* I can see how people passed out while watching that.