127 Hours and being ahead of the game

The trailer for Danny Boyle’s next movie, 127 Hours, has been released, and it’s not shy about touting the Oscar-winner’s previous successes.

For the sake of movie spoilers, I’m putting the rest of this post behind a jump…

I got about halfway through the trailer when I thought that it looked familiar, but it wasn’t until the ‘Based on the Life Story of Aron Ralston’ that I realized why. It’s pretty rare that I read anything resembling biographies, so it comes as surprise to be ahead of the game and know a story in advance.

I heard about Ralston’s…incident, let’s call it, back when it made the news even over in the UK in 2003. I think anyone who heard about what happened spared a moment to consider exactly what they would do in his circumstance, and how they would cope with the choice he was faced with.

I picked up his book that came out later that year, too, the aptly-titled Between a Rock and A Hard Place that detailed the incident and his climbing experience that led to it.

In case you were wondering, yep, that’s a prosthetic arm he has on the cover.

And yes, the picture below is one he took while his arm was trapped by an unmovable boulder for 127 hours. Luckily he had a penknife.

You can see where this is going, right?

My main problem with the book was that while you can’t help but sympathize with Ralston’s situation, you don’t sympathize with Ralston himself. He comes across as, to put it bluntly, a bit of a douche. He consistently takes stupid risks in pursuit of adventure and they end up landing him in a deadly situation that he could have avoided – or at least limited – had he simply been a more careful planner. Even though he becomes aware of that through the course of his recounting the incident, this overshadowed the book for me.

That said, the movie looks good. Firstly, very few directors can use locations like Danny Boyle can, and the desert and canyons of the American west are spectacular.

Secondly, the casting is spot on – because as unlikeable douches go, I think James Franco (who seems to have traded in his heroin-chic teeth for a big set of pearly whites, judging by the trailer) can do them like no other. Mainly that’s because he has an ability to make unlikeable douches likeable. The story itself is tailor made for a great character arc as Ralston comes to grips with his situation and I think Franco can really sell that.

Having Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn as two hikers he meets along the way doesn’t hurt, either.

Of course, as I know how the movie ends I may wait until it comes out on DVD…

Tags: Books-Archived, Casting, Movies-Archived

This entry was posted on August 25, 2010 at 10:10 am and is filed under Archive, Books-Archived, Movies-Archived. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.