127 Hours

By Meg Sugden

When thinking about true life stories that prove a massive hit but also tell the story in the best way possible, instantly 127 hours springs to mind as it is powerful, moving and also a little bit gruesome at the same time. This film follows Aron Ralston's (James Franco) story, a mountaineer who become trapped under a boulder in a Utah canyon, who resorts to cutting off his own arm in the effort to survive.

The film begins as we see Aron going out into the world, packing his stuff up for another adventure in the canyon's; like any normal day that he goes on and more importantly he doesn't tell anyone where he is going. Like most of his normal days he bikes to a destination and then proceeds to climb into the canyons, but this time he comes across two girls who are hiking and proceeds to show them amazing things that the canyons have to offer. After climbing, hiking and plunging into secrets pools they have to go home, but end up inviting Aron to a party there having that evening, which he agrees to.

Minutes later we see him going about his way through a narrow slip in the canyon alone, near Moab, Utah, and proceed to make his way down deeper through the thing passage, until he reaches a point where the rock have been stacked up and fallen. Thinking he can make his way over by climbing he starts to pull himself up to find a way to the top, only to pull on a loose bolder which dislodges itself from the other and they both go crashing to the floor of the narrow canyon passage. Aron's hand is wedged under the boulder against the wall. Unable to move he panics and attempts to pull his arms free, hack against the rock with his pocket knife blade and eventually give up.

This results in 127 hours of being trapped against this boulder and difficult watching from now onwards. This then becomes the rest of the film as we see him start to go crazy from no social interaction and not enough food or water. He has the basics that he needs to survive but it isn't enough to survive on until someone realises he's missing and then eventually finds him, he is too far inside the canyon to be seen and no one knew where he was going. It proves so difficult to act out the next scenes of the film as we see Aron (Franco) make films of what he's been doing during the day and we eventually see him begin to go crazy. This would have been one of the scariest things to ensure ever, being scared and all alone with no one to come and rescue you because no one knows your out there
For 5 day, 127 hours, Aron stayed under that boulder. He knew something had to be done as the arm was becoming dead and had already started to decompose and gas releasing as he poked him knife into his thumb on the trapped arm. He knew that he had to free himself or he was going to die as the decaying gas spread to the rest of his body. Using only a pocket knife, and the smaller blade on it, as the larger one was blunt from stabbing at the rock day earlier, he began to hack away at his arm. This is certainly one of the most gruesome scenes in a film as we see the desperation and fighting to get free; to survive. He ties a pipe, fashioned from the inner linings of his water bottle, around the top of his arm to stem the blood flow as he cuts through layers of skin, artery, muscle and tendon. Until he hits the nerve going through his arm and so begins the most painful part. We feel every pain he does as merely touching it sends bolts up with arms and shock waves through his entire body. You can only image what the pain must have felt as he slammed his knife through it, severing the link between his arm and the rest of his body.

 Within an hour of cutting and mashing up what was left of his arm, he fell backwards and was free. It must have been a moment of pure joy and freedom, but at the same time he knew that he had to get out of there and get his arm seen to. The film altogether is stunning and so well told. Its accurate to how it really happened and true to the real Aron Ralston's trauma that he had to go through and what he had to ensure; and thinking that this is a true story makes it so unbelievable that he actually managed to walk out of it, and make it back to town alive.