127 Hours is a 2010 biographical survival drama film produced and directed by Danny Boyle. The film, based on Ralston's memoir Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2004), was written by Boyle and Simon Beaufoy, co-produced by Christian Colson and John Smithson, and scored by A. R. Rahman. Beaufoy, Colson, and Rahman had all previously worked with Boyle on Slumdog Millionaire (2008). 127 Hours was well received by critics and audiences and was runner up for six Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Franco and Best Picture.
The film was distributed theatrically by Warner Bros. in the United Kingdom and through the Netherlands.
Plot
In April 2003, mountaineer Aron Ralston goes hiking at Utah's Canyonlands National Park. He befriends hikers Kristi and Megan, and shows them an underground pool. After swimming, Aron parts ways with the hikers, and continues through a slot canyon in Blue John Canyon. While climbing in a canyon, he slips and falls, knocking a boulder loose which falls and crushes his right hand and wrist against the wall. He calls for help but realizes that he is all alone.
Ralston begins recording a video diary to maintain morale as he chips away parts of the boulder in an attempt to free himself and tries to keep warm at night. He rations his food and water in order to survive the ordeal. He sets up a pulley using his climbing rope in a futile attempt to lift the boulder.
Over the next five days, Ralston tries using his pocket knife to cut himself free, but the blade is too dull to cut bone. With no water available, he is forced to drink his urine. In his videos, he becomes desperate and depressed. He hallucinates about escape, relationships, and past experiences including a former lover, family, and Kristi and Megan. During one hallucination, he realizes that his mistake was that he did not tell anyone where he was going, and decides that destiny has trapped him with the boulder.
Using his knowledge of torque, Ralston fashions a tourniquet from CamelBak tube insulation and uses a carabiner to tighten it before breaking the bones in his arm. Using the pocket knife, he slowly amputates his arm. He wraps the stump to prevent exsanguination, and takes a picture of the boulder. He then rappels down a 65-foot rockface using his other arm and drinks rainwater from a pond. He meets a family on a hike, who alert the authorities, and a Utah Highway Patrol helicopter brings him to a hospital.
Years later after the accident, Ralston starts a family, continues climbing and always leaves a note saying where he has gone.
Cast
- James Franco as Aron Ralston
- Kate Mara as Kristi Moore
- Amber Tamblyn as Megan McBride
- Clémence Poésy as Rana, Aron Ralston's lover
- Lizzy Caplan as Sonja Ralston, Aron's younger sister
- Kate Burton as Donna Ralston, Aron's mother
- Treat Williams as Larry Ralston, Aron's father
Ralston himself, his wife and son make cameo appearances at the end of the film.
Authenticity
The scenes early in the film of Ralston's encounter with the two hikers were altered to portray Ralston showing them a hidden pool, when in reality he just showed them some basic climbing moves. Despite these changes, with which he was initially uncomfortable, Ralston says the rest of the film is "so factually accurate it is as close to a documentary as you can get and still be a drama."
Other changes from the book include omissions of descriptions of Ralston's efforts after freeing himself: his bike was chained to itself, not to the tree as depicted at the beginning of the movie; he had to decide where to seek the fastest medical attention; he took a photo of himself at the small brown pool from which he really did drink; he had his first bowel movement of the week; he abandoned a lot of the items he had kept throughout his confinement; he got lost in a side canyon; and he met a family from the Netherlands (not an American family), Eric, Monique, and Andy Meijer, who already knew that he was probably lost in the area, thanks to the searches of his parents and the authorities. (The actor who plays Eric Meijer, Pieter Jan Brugge, is Dutch.)
Franco is never shown uttering even an "Ow"; Ralston wrote that this is accurate. Ralston did send Monique and Andy to run ahead to get help, and Ralston did walk seven miles before the helicopter came, although this trek is shown in the film's alternative ending.
Production
Danny Boyle had been wanting to make a film about Ralston's ordeal for four years; he wrote a film treatment and Simon Beaufoy wrote the screenplay. Boyle describes 127 Hours as "an action movie with a guy who can't move." He also expressed an interest for a more intimate film than his previous film, Slumdog Millionaire (2008): "I remember thinking, I must do a film where I follow an actor the way Darren Aronofsky did with The Wrestler. So 127 Hours is my version of that."
Boyle and Fox Searchlight announced plans to create 127 Hours in November 2009, and News of the World reported that month that Cillian Murphy was Boyle's top choice to play Ralston. In January 2010, James Franco was cast as Ralston. In March 2010, filming began in Utah; Boyle intended to shoot the first part of the film with no dialogue. By 17 June 2010, the film was in post-production.
Boyle made the very unusual move of hiring two cinematographers to work first unit, Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak, each of whom shot 50 percent of the film by trading off with each other. This allowed Boyle and Franco to work long days without wearing out the crew.
Boyle enlisted makeup effects designer Tony Gardner and his effects company, Alterian, Inc., to re-create the character's amputation of his own arm. Boyle stressed that the realism of the arm as well as the process itself were key to the audience's investing in the character's experience, and that the makeup effects' success would impact the film's success. The false arm rigs were created in layers, from fiberglass and steel bone, through silicone and fibrous muscle and tendon, to functional veins and arteries, and finally skinned with a translucent silicone layer of skin with a thin layer of subcutaneous silicone fat. Gardner states that the effects work was extremely stressful, as he wanted to do justice to the story; he credits James Franco equally with the success of the effects work. Three prosthetics were used in all, with two designed to show the innards of the arm and another to emulate the outside of it. Franco would later note that seeing blood on the arm was difficult for him and his reactions in those scenes were genuine.
Franco admitted that shooting the film was physically hard on him: "There was a lot of physical pain, and Danny knew that it was going to cause a lot of pain. And I asked him after we did the movie, 'How did you know how far you could push it?' ... I had plenty of scars...Not only am I feeling physical pain, but I'm getting exhausted. It became less of a façade I put on and more of an experience that I went through."
Release
127 Hours was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on 12 September 2010, following its premiere at the 2010 Telluride Film Festival. The film was selected to close the 2010 London Film Festival on 28 October 2010. It was given a limited release in the United States on 5 November 2010. It was released in the United Kingdom on 7 January 2011, and in India on 26 January 2011.
Soundtrack
Home media
Reception
There were many published reports (not all confirmed) that the trailer and film made audience members ill. The Huffington Post, in November 2010, wrote that it "has gotten audiences fainting, vomiting and worse in numbers unseen since The Exorcist – and the movie has not even hit theaters yet." During the screenings at Telluride Film Festival, two people required medical attention. At the first screening, an audience member became lightheaded and was taken out of the screening on a gurney. During a subsequent screening, another viewer suffered a panic attack. Similar reactions were reported at the Toronto International Film Festival and a special screening hosted by Pixar and Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3 (2010) and Coco (2017). The website Movieline published "Armed and Dangerous: A Comprehensive Timeline of Everyone Who's Fainted (Or Worse) at 127 Hours."
Critical Reception
On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 93% based on 226 reviews, with an average rating of 8.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "As gut-wrenching as it is inspirational, 127 Hours unites one of Danny Boyle's most beautifully exuberant directorial efforts with a terrific performance from James Franco." On Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating to reviews, the film has an average score of 82 out of 100, based on 38 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
Writing for DVD Talk, Casey Burchby concluded that "127 Hours will stay with you not necessarily as a story of survival, but as a story of a harrowing interior experience". Richard Roeper of The Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars, said he believed Franco deserved an Oscar nomination for his performance, and called the film "one of the best of the decade." Roger Ebert also awarded the film four stars and wrote that "127 Hours is like an exercise in conquering the unfilmable". Gazelle Emami wrote for The Huffington Post, describing Franco's performance as "mesmerizing" and "incredible."
Accolades
127 Hours is a 2010 British independent biographical adventure film directed by Danny Boyle. It stars James Franco in the principal role as real-life mountain climber Aron Ralston, whose hand was trapped under a boulder in a Utah ravine for more than five days in April 2003. Adapted from Ralston's autobiography Between a Rock and a Hard Place, 127 Hours's screenplay was written by Boyle and Simon Beaufoy. Distributors Fox Searchlight and Pathé gave the feature limited releases in the United States and United Kingdom on 5 November 2010 and 7 January 2011, respectively. It grossed £35.8 million at the box office by the end of its worldwide theatrical run. Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator surveyed 215 reviews and judged 93% to be positive. Additionally, 127 Hours appeared on more than two dozen movie reviewers' Top Ten lists for the best movies of 2010.
The film has received honors for its direction, music, cinematography and writing, as well as for the lead performance by Franco. At the 68th Golden Globe Awards ceremony, 127 Hours earned three nominations: for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama, Best Original Score and Best Screenplay. The picture was nominated in nine Satellite Award categories, including direction, score, sound, original song and visual effects. It also received nine nominations from the Broadcast Film Critics Association. The 64th British Academy Film Awards nominated it for eight of their awards, including Best Director, Best Editing, Best Music and Best Sound. Additionally, 127 Hours was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Film, but lost to The King's Speech. It performed similarly at the 83rd Academy Awards, where it was nominated in six categories: Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Original Song (for "If I Rise") and Best Picture, but lost respectively in all categories to The King's Speech, The Social Network, and Toy Story 3.
Franco was named Best Actor by the New York Film Critics Online and 2010 Independent Spirit Awards. He also received recognition from the Screen Actors Guild, at their 17th annual ceremony. Franco's arm amputation scene towards the end of 127 Hours was nominated at the viewer-voted 2011 MTV Movie Awards. Boyle's and Beaufoy's efforts on the movie's script earned them nominations from the Writers Guild of America and Evening Standard British Film Awards. Along with producer Christian Colson, Boyle garnered another nomination, this time from the Producers Guild of America. The Detroit Film Critics Society honored Boyle as Best Director. Suttirat Larlarb's input on the movie's production design earned her one nomination from the Art Directors Guild. The film's cinematography garnered nominations at the 2010 Houston Film Critics Awards and the 2010 San Diego Film Critics Society Awards. The American Film Institute listed 127 Hours as one of the ten best movies of 2010.