RAVE - 127 Hours

I've vacillated over this film for weeks now. Should I see it at the theater? Can I find someone else that wants to see it? Should I see it on my own? Will I be like that dipstick CEO of Just Desserts who was photographed having fainted during one of the early showings of the film. Surely he didn't do that just for the publicity?

In the end, I downloaded it and watched it on my Mac.

Beautifully filmed, as you'd expect from Danny Boyle and team. Probably hard to imagine anything being more different from Slumdog Millionaire.

James Franco's unabashed approach / attack on the Moab, Utah canyons is brought to a crash when he gets his arm trapped by a boulder in a crevasse.

As he realizes his predicament, things get tense. Just how much tension Boyle squeezes out of the film, considering how every man and his dog knows how it panned out, is amazing. When considering the editing, the film owes more to Boyle's ground-breaking Trainspotting than you'd ever imagine.

127 hours is the time he's trapped, during which 5 days he watches footage filmed on his digital camera, gets weak and delirious from lack of food and water, imagines noises in the dark, but generally fares better than would someone less fit.

Everyone knows what he's going to do. Perhaps HE realizes what he'll have to do, but that doesn't stop him methodically scraping away the rock and fiddling with his gear while his chronometer marks the time he knows he can survive in the cold of the crevasse.

I know I wish I hadn't known in advance what he was going to need to do to get out. Perhaps that would have made it more than just the build up to the gruesome-ness, and the ramp down from the gruesome-ness, of the escape.

Was it the most intense scene in any movie to date? Probably. It certainly had me clenching and un-clenching my fists, looking away and then back, and hitting the mute button, but it was the constant awareness that someone had actually done this in real life that prevented it from being just another light-hearted cutting your arm off to escape from a crevasse situation.

A good film, but not necessarily a great one. I can see why it's not up for any awards.