2. 127 Hours
Danny Boyle is a bold film-maker with a uniquely wandering eye. His knack of turning potentially tricky subject matter into engaging, dynamic movies is firmly established. By choosing to adapt a non-fiction book about a guy who gets trapped by a boulder, Boyle surely posed the biggest question - how can you make a movie out of that? Out in the Utah desert, Aron Ralston gets pinned by a rogue boulder in a freak accident. He's an extreme sports type, preferring the solo adventure, but he's also neglected to tell anyone where he's going. He gets to reflect on that quite a lot. Watch any Danny Boyle movie and you witness that restless energy; there's always propulsion and momentum in his films. It now seems obvious that he would take a character so physically anchored in a story and allow him to escape through his own imagination. So what we end up with is a delirious mix of desperate struggle for survival, mixed with direct-to-camera realisations of self as Aron comes to terms with the certain knowledge that, in order to even have a chance of getting out alive, he will have to cut off his trapped arm, using only a blunt pen-knife. Boyle knows we all know that moment has to come. In various interviews promoting the movie, he said it wasn't what people were probably expecting when it came to the scene when it happens. He said it wasn't gory, that it was a brief moment. He was lying when he said that. The act of cutting turns out not to be quite so bad as one might think. In fact, Aron (brilliantly played by James Franco) makes it look like a relatively easy, mostly pain-free process. You start to get the idea you could maybe even do it to yourself if you really, really
had to. That is, until he hits a crimson, rope-like nerve. The instant of pain is delivered with sadistic precision - a ruby red internal close-up of the nerve flashes up as a searing noise plays over the soundtrack, and anyone watching who ever had a bad tooth, or a broken bone, or a deep cut jumps in sympathy. When it happens a second time, it's even worse. Half the audience is on the ceiling and by then, the moment is over. The arm is cut off, Aron staggers back and some movie magic happens as we share the sense of release - the worst is over, the pain is gone. Only then the next horror sinks in - that he might bleed to death, and is still stranded in the desert - but we know we've seen the worst of it, and that feeling of freedom stays with us, willing him along on those final steps to salvation.