I am a Rock

Rating: 9/10 (6 April 2011)

A few years ago, while boarding the tube, I missed my footing and fell down the gap between the platform and the train. Just in time, I managed to hook my elbows onto the carriage floor, while performing the can-can from the waist down. I knew I had only seconds before the unthinkable happened... and then a young French tourist with a big red rucksack hauled me inside.
The point being: at no stage did I feel like I was in a Danny Boyle movie. Time steadfastly refused to hyperventilate, while reality in general resolutely failed to fracture into a series of dizzying hyperkinetic edits. No banging tunes. If I'm honest, it was just really, really embarrassing.
But 127 Hours is most decidedly a Boyle picture: if being trapped underneath a rock for nearly a week must feel a trifle monotonous, you wouldn't guess it from his take on Aron Ralston's memoirs. Comparisons with Touching the Void are inevitable – Aron's mishap even occurred the year Kevin Macdonald's film was released. Yet unlike 'Void, this is a weird sort of premise for an action film, in which the subject is Standing Still more often than Running and Jumping (or Crawling and Swearing). You can't blame the director, then, for wanting to jolly things along with those funny little tics of his.
Ralston, played with immense conviction by James Franco, is the devil-may-care mountaineer who made headlines in 2003 after falling through a crevice and getting pinned against a canyon wall by a dislodged boulder – truly, a destiny with density. Some might call that unlucky. Or, like the delirious Ralston, firmly believe that "From the minute I was born, every breath has been leading me to this crack in the surface of the Earth. This rock has been waiting for me all my life."
At this stage, it probably wouldn't have been useful to point out to him that life is essentially meaningless, a bunch of random events inviting any number of feeble interpretations, and thus ultimately a bad joke played on those foolish enough to ascribe innate structure or pattern to it. That probably wouldn't have helped. All the same, we can at least entertain the notion that any and all such events present opportunities for random acts of senseless kindness – or courage. As re-enacted in the film's skilfully-edited money shot, Ralston's sole stab at survival means rendering himself deficit to the sum of one right arm. (This reviewer's screening was at 9.30 in the morning, perhaps not the best time to catch a horribly authentic self-amputation. Then again, when would that optimum hour be?)
The film is bookended by images of vast crowds – in triplicate; the screen splitting three ways to accommodate the great churn of humanity, from whom reckless Ralston will deliberately extricate himself – and then, in the way of Boyle movies from Trainspotting to The Beach, desperately attempt to rejoin.
There's also cackling irony in the fact that while Ralston's trapped, the screen fair teems with other people, via memories of his family, past girlfriends – even premonitory visions of a future son. If you were wondering how fellow cast members slotted into such a solitary story, they're all down there in Blue John Canyon, in James Franco's bonce.
Yet strangely, he never seems so alone as during those first few moments following his extrication. Baptised in blood and sweat, he is transformed into a spirit as mighty, as elemental, but just as isolated, as that vast ancient canyon. That boulder didn't just happen to Ralston; he faced the old bastard on equal terms. And gave it the finger.