Danny Boyle's best film

Rating: 8/10 (10 November 2010)

There are two main elements that make this story seem like it would never work as a narrative film. Firstly, everyone knows the ending. The film is based on a very widely reported true story that almost everyone seems to know about or at least heard about in passing. And so, must people go into the film knowing how it is going to end. Boyle and company faced a very major obstacle they needed to get over: how will they keep their audience interested in a story they already know the outcome of? In addition, there is the entire notion of dramatic structure. And when you have a story that takes place almost entirely with one character who has his hand stuck under a rock, your dramatic options seem relatively limited. Aside from the one major conflict that is set up very early on, there doesn't seem to be any room for development, further conflict, complications, additional obstacles, or any kind of change whatsoever. The character is quite literally and physically stuck. How do you make this compelling?
Firstly, Boyle's visual style does a pretty good job at keeping us interested. Continuing his streak with Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle, along with cinematographers Anthony Dodd Mantle and Enrique Chediak create an absolutely beautiful and rich visual palette, with dynamic camera movements and angles, beautiful framing and use of color, use of different kinds of cameras for different visual styles – consumer-grade digital cameras to get that extreme depth of field and to have objects literally pressed right up against the lens in crisp focus; wide-angle lenses, fascinating point-of-view shots and other elements that all serve to create this incredibly intense and visceral cinematic experience. The vibrant editing also does its job, with very quick, rapid-fire cuts and some of the best and most unique use of split-screen imagery I've ever seen further adding to the film's unique visual style.
So how does Boyle create dramatic tension in a movie about a man who spends the entire time with his hand stuck under a rock in an isolated canyon? Easy – he takes us out of the canyon. After the accident, which occurs fairly early on in the story, the film's linear reality begins to fragment, and we begin to see what Aron begins to see. Fascinatingly enough, the film never quite makes it clear what we are seeing are flashbacks, visions and premonitions hallucinated by Aron in his desperate situation, or a combination of the two. The fact that the film blurs these lines makes the experience all the more visceral and puts us even further and deeper into Aron's head. The dynamic style of the film as well as the extremely subjective point of view it puts us in helps to create this inescapable feeling of intensity and dread as the film progresses – it is quite simple one of the most intense and nerve-racking films I have ever experienced. Our connection with the character is so strong and the style so inescapable that even events that we know will happen make us feel nervous and uncomfortable. You really start thinking: there is just absolutely no other way out of this situation, and as this truth becomes more and more obvious to Aron, the feeling of dread only intensifies and intensifies leading up to the horrifically graphic climax.
When I first heard about this project, I didn't know if there was anything that could be done. And yet, Boyle and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy found an absolutely brilliant way to get around these problems, and ended up creating one of the most compelling films I have had the pleasure to see this year. By removing us from the canyon, the film ceases to be about a character with his hand stuck under a rock, and becomes a film about the character himself. What makes Aron tick? What happened to him to get him in this situation to begin with, and what does he have inside him that drives him to commit this insanely desperate and courageous act he commits at the end, one which my friends and I deliberated for hours whether or not we would be capable of doing, only to reach the conclusion that there is no way in the world we would be able to do what Aron did if we found ourselves in a similar situation. We see Aron interacting with other people, and pushing them away. We see him leisurely ignoring his friendly boss as he leaves the store he works at before he leaves for his hiking trip. We see him ignoring his mother's phone calls. We see him encounter and have fun with the two hiking girls, only to leave them as abruptly and as nonchalantly as he encountered them. In flashbacks, we see a past relationship Aron shared with a beautiful blonde girl when he was younger, a relationship that ended sourly after Aron wouldn't let her in. Even when we flash back to Aron's youth, we see that his relationship with his family was one of silence. Aron lives in his own world and doesn't let anyone in, and it is this rejection of other people that got him in this situation in the first place. However, it is the change he undergoes in the canyon under the rock as he begins to realize the mistakes he has made and yearn again for the human connection he has lacked all these years that gives him the strength to do what he did. And the shots of large crowds of people that bookend the film lend further poignancy to this notion of human connection that is so beautifully depicted in this amazing and inspirational true story of perseverance and survival.