Survival In The Utah Badlands

Rating: 9/10 (3 December 2010)

True-life survival stories often make for compelling films, but it would seem after the idea of "survivalist" was appropriated by the highly rated CBS-TV "reality" show Survivor that this particular genre had run its course. As any discerning person will attest to, however, Survivor and other like-minded TV shows are really merely game shows or contests roughened up for the participants. Such a fact can be borne out by the artistic success of a film like director Danny Boyle's 127 HOURS, one of the best films of 2010, though it has caused some consternation among film goers for the very method of survival it depicts.
The film is based on the experiences of Colorado-born adventurer Aron Ralston (portrayed by James Franco), who had gone out on a cross-country hike in the badlands of southern Utah in late April 2003. He hiked into isolated Bluejohn Canyon some thirty miles outside the Utah town of Moab and, while repelling down a cliff into the bottom of a canyon, dislodged a sizable rock and then slipped. The rock wedged his right arm between it and the wall of the canyon, and he remained stuck there for 127 hours, or just over five days in all. Braving temperatures that ranged from the lower 90s during the day to below 50 degrees at night, he had to be careful how he used his water, and he documented his story and his personal musings on his camcorder, trying very hard to dislodge the rock that was keeping him in place by chipping away at it with a rather cheap made-in-China pocket knife. It only seemed to prolong the agony, because the rock was never dislodged. With very little time left, and his water supply running dangerously low, he was forced to do the unthinkable with that very same knife.
Although Boyle, known for such films as TRAINSPOTTING, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, and the grisly 2002 zombie flick 28 DAYS LATER, makes the same mistake his fellow British director Tony Scott has done on his films via the use of an occasionally loud industrial-type rock score by A.R. Rahman and sometimes jerky camera movements, he mostly sticks to the facts surrounding Ralston's life and ordeal. As portrayed quite well by Franco, Ralston comes off as a fairly cocky young man with a penchant for extreme adventure who found out how high a price can be paid for forgetting what it can often take to survive such an adventure. The film bears a significant similarity to ALIVE, the 1993 film in which where the participants of that true-life ordeal (the 1972 Andean plane crash saga) were forced to survive their ordeal in one of the worst ways possible, in that case by resorting to cannibalism. Here, of course, Ralston, totally alone, cut off from the outside world in an isolated chasm where few people would have ever dared to go by themselves, had no other choice but to do what he did, which meant losing the lower half of his right arm in the process.
Although it is understandable that the scene in question would leave a lot of people extremely queasy, this is every bit as unavoidable an aspect of the story as was the cannibalism in ALIVE, even though it takes up three to five minutes near the film's climax. Boyle can sometimes be accused of going too far with the viscera in his other films; and the scene is still quite shocking, even when compared to the opening twenty minutes of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Still, thanks in large part to the way Franco portrays the change in Ralston's behavior from happy-go-lucky adventurer to a survivor almost reduced to nothing, 127 HOURS is a compelling film, especially given the fact that Boyle decided to film it in the very locations in Utah where Franco's saga took place. Besides being a compelling, if somewhat uneasy, film, it shows us how precious life is, and not to take it for granted, as the real-life Aron Ralston did with nearly fatal results.