Young and healthy and invincible

Rating: 8/10 (22 May 2011)

This true story is simple enough. Aron Ralston sets out for a weekend trip to a slot canyon in the Canyonlands National Park in Utah, gets pinned by a boulder, and after five days frees himself and makes it out alive. The movie succeeded in dramatizing the event in a manner that kept my attention. The introduction that has Ralston bicycling in some twenty miles to the entry of the canyon was the highlight of the film for me. It captured the thrill of being alone in a spectacularly magical and beautiful landscape and feeling truly alive. This part of the movie makes a great advertisement for Utah. A Canyonlands travelogue on Blu-ray would make for great entertainment.
It was dumb for Ralston not to have told anyone where he was going, which he admits, but I am willing to give him a pass on this, at least from what we see of him in the movie. He was in his 20s, in the peak of health, and an experienced outdoors-man--I could see how he might feel invincible and make the mistake he did.
Whereas this movie personalizes the experience, I found the NBC Dateline documentary "Desperate Days in Blue John Canyon" to have a greater emotional impact. In that film Tom Brokaw accompanies Ralston on a repeat of his fateful journey. This was only six months after the original event and it astonished me that Ralston had the courage to do it. Fitted with a prosthesis he made the whole trip without aid, from lowering himself into the canyon to the repel out. Seeing some of Ralston's actual video as well as hearing the audio of other parts had a much greater impact on me that seeing Franco duplicate it, even as good as Franco is in the role. And we are spared seeing the graphic details of the main event--hearing Ralston describe it is quite enough. This documentary is available on YouTube.
It's easy to be convinced of the fragility of life, but the value of this movie is to see the other end of that spectrum, what a body can withstand at the outer limits of endurance.