1) Danny Boyle is a very talented director. If he never makes another great film he has earned that distinction for Trainspotting alone. However, sometimes he can get in his own way as well. I'm talking about stuff like the opening split screens and the countless shots of the water being drained away or the mechanisms inside the camera slowly moving when Aron Ralston pushes record. It's all very cool and gets critics to write adjectives like "kinetic" or "inventive" in their reviews, but as far as serving the story, it can often be just plain distracting.
2) But yes, I did say he is very talented. For instance, see the way Boyle communicated the beginnings of Rolston's love for nature. There was no incredibly stretched-out backstory. Just a moment where he looks over the Utah landscape with his father. With one shot, Boyle showed us the birth of the protagonist's adventurous streak and the family bond that he had somehow allowed to slip away and was on the verge of losing for good.
3) As Rolston, James Franco gave a very solid performance. He is a very charismatic screen presence and did a very job of communicating the urgency and helplessness of his character's situation. I also have to give him major points for not going for any high emotional moments. I don't believe he shed a single tear in the film (although I may be wrong; I fell asleep for a few seconds toward the conclusion). A lesser actor may have been crying the whole film, like the male version of Julia Ormond in Legends of the Fall. Or myself, if the same thing ever happened to me.
4) For a film that spends most of its time in a tiny crevice of a cave, there were some beautiful images created by cinematographers Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak. I'm talking specifically about the aforementioned shots of the horizon that Ralston witnesses for the first time with his father (but then again, if you can mess that shot up, you probably shouldn't be making films) and the shots of the underground pool where Ralston takes the two hikers he encounters (this by the way was one of the only aspects of Ralston's story that was created strictly for the screen). I will take points off though for the fact that I believe the piece was shot on video instead of film. This is probably the case with most movies at this point, but video just doesn't look as good as film. In other news, I still prefer beta video casettes to DVDs.
5) Major props go out to composer (and Indian megastar) A.R. Rahman for a brilliant film score. The score mixed aspects of rock, dance, and Indian instrumentation for a soundtrack that helped immensely in upping the pace of a film that could have been rather static. It was two weeks ago that I watched the movie so it isn't like I remember any of the tracks in particular, but there was one scene where Ralston makes a futile attempt to escape from his predicament that Rahman's music really took to another level. It made me sit up in my couch and commence toe-tapping. It was the kind of score that not only bolsters the film it accompanies, but wouldn't look out of place in your CD collection on the solo tip. By the way, tremendous year for film scores in 2010. Trent Reznor's The Social Network, Hans Zimmer's Inception, and this one were all among the best soundtracks in recent memory.
6) Why do I feel like the hikers Ralston ran into during his fateful excursion probably didn't look like Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn, the actresses who played them in the film? If it was them that he had taken the dip in the pool with, maybe Ralston would have cut his trip short? Then again, as I said, the pool thing never happened (he simply showed them some climbing techniques, not that it matters in a movie version where elaboration is the norm) and I guess Ralston does seem like a different kind of character.
7) Very weird scene happened around the middle of the film's 94-minute running time: Ralston is sitting there with his arm crushed against the wall, and he is starting to feel desperate. So...he busts out his video camera and rewinds to the part where he is dipping in the pool with the two lovely hikers. He pauses on Mara's character in her wet brassiere, and contemplates a little manual manipulation. Instead, he thinks better of it and commits himself to trying even harder to get out of the hole. It was just a very odd scene. First of all, if I had my arm slammed against a rock wall, masturbation would PROBABLY be the last thing on my mind, no matter how many bra-laden hikers I had skinny-dipping on my video camera. But second, if I did decide to go to work, is there anything wrong with that? Couldn't I get down to business and THEN throw together a rock-climbing apparatus with one hand? Were the filmmakers making a statement about the wastefulness of masturbation? Again, the scene was kind of nutty.
8) The scene where dude takes his arm off was rather graphic, which I have to give Boyle credit for. I'm sure it could have been tempting to whitewash the scene for the mass audience. But Boyle took you right into the situation instead, with Ralston breaking his arm in multiple places and then sawing the thing off with a dull blade in a bloody, disgusting visual that would make George Romero proud...and a bit envious. It was enough to make me wonder if I could have pulled the same stunt in a similar situation. And the fact is I just don't know. I would like to think I would do what I had to do to survive, but you are talking about hacking off your own limb with a Swiss army knife. Minus a mysterious shipment of novocaine, I most likely would have ended up as vulture food.
9) By the way, dap goes out to the music supervisor for 127 Hours. It may have been fairly obvious for anyone who had heard the song before, but if you were going to make a film about a wayward adventurer who dismembers his own appendage in order to continue breathing air, you really can't choose a better song for the denouement then Sigur Ros's "Festival." Nice call.
10) In the end, I think I would give the film about a B, maybe a B-. They did a good job making an interesting, visually stimulating film about a dude with his arm stuck between a boulder and a rock wall (the name of Ralston's biography? Between a Rock and a Hard Place! Kind of genius), but in the end that is what it is, and even at only an hour and a half, it's a long time to watch a guy talk into his video camera, contemplating drinking his own urine and his mortality. The climax really rallied the piece though, with Ralston's escape (uh yeah, sorry if I'm spoiling this for you; see the movie sooner and maybe read a newspaper) and the very classy choice of showing the real Ralston and his family as the final image of the piece. Definitely check it out. Just don't expect anything spectacular (it is still ten times better than the contrived nonsense that is Boyle's Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire).
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