By Scott Martin

127 Hours, USA / UK, 2010

Directed by Danny Boyle

“Fifteen minutes of sunlight every day. At 8:30am, a lone raven flies overhead. Almost out of water. No more food. God knows how long is left to go.”

I feel more than free to talk about the conclusion of this film, seeing as how it was one of the bigger news stories around five years ago. Aron Ralston, a toned and talented rock climber and athlete, fell into a canyon in the desert and was trapped “between a rock and a hard place” (the name of Ralston’s inspirational memoir), with his arm stuck between a fallen rock and the side of a mountain crevice. Consider the outcome: lose the arm or die. On paper, that choice seems to already be made, and maybe for Aron Ralston it already was. It’s just … getting there. That’s the film, and the difference between films like this and, say, Saw (1 through 18) is that this film isn’t built around the gore of that decision or the horror of that gore. Films like Saw (2004), while it’s an excellent film in its own right, seek to exploit the violent nature of the situation rather than the humanity that can be born from it. Read More