"Lesson: don't buy the cheap made-in-China multi-tools...."One of the great achievements of Danny Boyle as a director is that he is not really concerned about genre but simply about great film-making from both technical and emotional points of view. With 127 Hours we are immediately moved from the large-canvas sweep of Slumdog to an intimate, tightly-focussed true-life scenario as adventurer Aron Ralston gets trapped by his arm in a freak boulder-fall in a remote crevasse in Utah over five days. As always with Boyle's films, 127 Hours is a technical triumph, using an array of technical conceits which dazzle and yet are controlled minutely in order to create such a satisfying cumulative effect, from the purposeful use of split screen to the aggressively foregrounded sound mix (even the sound of an ant crawling on skin is gripping). Playing Ralston, James Franco (one of the more interesting current twenty-something Hollywood actors) has most of the screen time to himself and absolutely nails the exuberance, self-realisation and sheer guts of the character, making his screen journey absorbing and engaging all the way through. The famous self-surgery sequence is quite brief but very intense, after which the audience's sense of relief and release matches that of the character on-screen. A.R.Rahman provides another stunning score, and as ever the choice of catalogue songs provides a brilliant mix of humour, pathos and nostalgia. Although 127 Hours is a very different story to Slumdog, Boyle's message seems similar: as individuals we are tiny specks in the expanse of time, space and even society, yet every human being has such extraordinary power and value, and that is what forms the heart of the wonderful achievement of this excellent film.
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