everything I've done and every choice I made brought me to this place and moment in time

Rating: 10/10 (13 November 2010)

It took four years for Danny Boyle to be able to make a non-documentary film based on the real life ordeal of American mountaineer and adventurer Aron Ralston.
The early obstacle was Ralston, who originally insisted that his memoir, Between_a_Rock_and_a_Hard_Place, had to be filmed as a straight documentary. What eventually changed Ralston's mind was Boyle's phenomenal Slumdog Millionaire. Boyle also had to call in every industry marker owed to him, over the financial success of Slumdog, in order to finally get 127 Hours made. The end result is another work of genius from Boyle and co-writer Simon Beaufoy and a tour de force performance by James Franco portraying Ralston.
127 Hours winds up being truer to the momentous essence of Ralston's story than straight documentary could have managed.
We get to see and enjoy some of the upsides of Ralston's pre-ordeal "hard hero" lifestyle. It's fun and exhilarating for also being reckless and extremely fortunate, right up to the point when the luck runs out.
A failure to prepare (beyond sheer physical ability) compounds the direness of a seemingly single misstep that turns out to be one in a long line of lucky mistakes. When every ounce matters, better gear was packed for entertainment (CD player, camera, video recorder, spare AA batteries) than for survival (dynamic rope, harness webbing, 'biners, headlamp, belay device and a poorly maintained, no-name multi-tool with blades as dull as a butter knife). Not a single rock tool among them. (What blade sharpens itself, except in TV commercials?)
None of that's about hindsight being 20-20; it's about training and preparedness. Ralston full well knew better.
As sensational as Ralston's true story is, Boyle makes a shrewd choice to underplay the pivotal act that Ralston is forced to commit, in order to save his own life, so that viewers never lose sight of the larger context of the story (insouciant selfishness) and are permitted to get inside of Ralston's expanding frame of mind. We see what we have to see and nothing more. (Some of what Ralston really did to his necrotic right hand is never depicted in the film, because it would have thrown the film far off into Saw territory.) This is very important, because frank self-criticism is an essential and transformative element of Ralston's experience. This is more profound than regret or even the will to live. This allows the many messages embedded within the story to have an impact on us, without over doing it.
Life threatening shock, elemental exposure, exhaustion, dehydration, electrolyte imbalance and likely early onset blood poisoning can individually, let alone in combination, produce moments of vivid hallucination and even supposed lucid premonition, in real life -- and to the film's story telling advantage. Some license is taken with these episodes, but mostly on the margins, with dazzling camera work. Much of what we see is what Ralston says he experienced and I have no doubts about the latter. What's even more amazing is how fully Franco immerses himself in episodes of grim determination and then delirium.
I was an avid non-professional climber back in the 1970s-80s, but not one of the gonzo-types with something to prove. I always knew that no matter what any human being brings to bear out in the elements, Mother Nature's got plenty of surprises that can overwhelm anyone and everyone. I climbed with a self-selected group who trained together and shared a life-and-death view that each of us goes in, and comes back, with ten fingers and ten toes. Every time. We began and ended with dotted I-s and crossed T-s of outdoorsmanship. We maintained our equipment because safety depended on it. We studied mountaineering medicine and wilderness survival, because we knew we'd have to rely on ourselves, not on radios or cel phones, in a jam. We practiced tying proper knots with one hand, because you can never know when you might have to. Every climb was technical, yet even with proper equipment in correct use, when things went wrong, it could happen faster than you could snap your fingers. Randomness (luck) always remains a factor; but luck tends to punish the prepared less.
I've fallen on belay, with the sickening experience of carabiners popping out, one after another. Ideally, they're not supposed to do that, but, at the same time, they're still helping to slow my fall, while I hope that one will finally hold, before I crash to a dead stop on top of some hard, unyielding thing. It's an icy feeling. It happens fast. You, and your fast belayer, think those thoughts.
Franco's sudden fall from the chockstone struck me as being very realistic, but that didn't hit me viscerally. The moment when Franco *chose* to break his radius and then his ulna, that's when I felt my blood leaving my hands and feet, in involuntary sympathetic shock, resurrecting a body memory of my own mishaps on climbs.
While self-rescue was a huge part of this story, Ralston would still have perished if he had not come upon the three vacationing hikers from the Netherlands, who provided him with water and food and then summoned a rescue helicopter.
Ralston extricated himself, but he likely still would not have survived all by himself.
While I'm not sure if Ralston has ever said it in exactly the words used in my title, the profoundly correct grasp of karma, as spoken by Franco at one point in the film, must be at the heart of why Ralston has said that he did not lose his hand, rather, he gained back his life, in the sense of his conscious connectedness to all of the people who are in it.
127 Hours has a grippingly authentic general feel that perfectly compliments the specific drama. It's artistry is everywhere, in the script, the cinematography, the score, set design, editing, direction and acting.
Absolutely Oscar worthy, on multiple counts.