As with Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy’s multi-award-winning Slumdog Millionaire, this movie is hyped up and with a blood-pounding soundtrack that draws you into the true story of Aron Ralston (James Franco) a rock climber mountaineering in Utah, 2003, when disaster strikes. Ralston is engaging, even charming, but he’s never humble, and that’s quite clear within the first five minutes. He might think he’s even invincible, though he’s about to learn his reality when he finds himself trapped… his right arm pinned under a boulder.
Suddenly our know-it-all protagonist is stuck physically and emotionally and so are we – stuck in an action movie without any action. The movie is based on Ralston’s memoir, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, and that’s where it pins us, too. As Aron’s clock-ticking 127 hours to freedom begins, we all know how it will end… Ralston will cut off his own arm with the same dull pen knife he’s spent hours chipping away at the rock with.
But this isn’t a film about self-amputation (though undoubtedly its box office appeal will partly be to young ‘Saw VI’ fans who think Franco’s hot and want to see the gore). This is a story about second chances, about disconnecting with a dead past, symbolized by the dead limb that Franco must finally leave behind. The rock represents the first thing in life that Ralston can’t defeat…the boulder in all our lives that we can’t quite lift away.
Danny Boyle works his magic as we watch Ralston slowly surrender into a sense of his true aloneness. This is a small person in a big place. (Think of how Mother Nature can drown us in a vast ocean.) Yet amid these daunting spaces, Boyle provides the finest of small details. A bug climbing up an itchy face, a fallen bottle of water that contained but one drop, a split second of sunlight on a leg. Our mouths are parched, our stomachs are in knots, and we become Ralston. It’s an acutely uncomfortable feeling – and some audiences may even respond with inappropriate laughter.
As in Slumdog, Boyle tips his camera, bathing the screen in warm yellow hues, working up an urgent frenzy. But this is also Franco’s film. This is the one that will put Franco on the map and earn him that one-man-show Oscar nomination. Yet, while the ending has the same triumphal grandeur as Slumdog – and a similar rousing soundtrack by the great Oscar-winner A.R. Rahman – the movie leaves you feeling unsettled. Unlike Dev Patel’s character, Jamal, in Slumdog, this isn’t the story of an underdog overcoming the forces laid out against him. Jamal was victim to his culture in Mumbai, but Aron Ralston was a superdog who chose to do this. He arrogantly put himself in this situation. As the film wraps you’ll find yourself saying, “What the F^#@K was he thinking?” Not to mention: “Why didn’t he just leave somebody a note!”