The film might be called 127 Hours but watching it will be some of the most intense 93 minutes you’ve ever seen.

An apparently highly accurate account of one man’s survival against all odds, 127 Hours tells the true story of Aron Ralston, a canyoneer who found himself in an impossible situation after a tiny mishap. After a boulder slips out from under him, Ralston finds himself trapped in the canyon when his right hand is stuck between the boulder and the canyon wall. The film shows the five days he spent there trying to free himself and examining his life while drifting in and out of dehydration fueled delirium and moments of intense clarity.

The movie is based on Between a Rock and a Hard Place, the book Ralston wrote about the 2003 ordeal and given it was all over the news at the time it isn’t much of a spoiler to say that he survived. I can’t imagine why they would make a movie about it if he did die unless people thought the Perfect Storm was a good idea. The movie draws upon both the book and the video recordings Ralston made while he was trapped in the canyon and as such is apparently very, very accurate. Ralston himself said it couldn’t have been more accurate if it were a documentary.

Accuracy aside, the movie is intense and compelling and despite the fact that the majority of the action takes place in a very small and claustrophobic area, it never loses its hold on the audience and just gets more and more intense. Part of the reason for this are the copious amounts of flash backs and hallucinations that director Danny Boyle injects into the film in between moments of Ralston dropping his utilitool and drinking his own piss. These moments are colorful, surreal and psychedelic and look fantastic which is no real surprise because the entire movie looks fantastic.

The visuals are absolutely breath taking and feature huge panoramic crane and airplane shots of the canyon and surrounding areas. These serve not just to provide something visually stunning to look at but also to give you a sense of scope in terms of just how completely fucked Ralston is. This is important as he starts off the film cocky and headstrong, not telling anyone where he was going, not answering his mother’s phone calls and just generally taking the line that because he is who he is and has been doing this for a really long time, he doesn’t have to worry and take precautions.

That is what we see unfold over the course of the film as Ralston realizes that in all likelihood, he is never going to make it out alive. Through his thoughts, his attempts to free himself and his video diary, we see him breakdown and realize all the choices he made to bring him to this position and to realize how sad it was to have these epiphanies that may never do him any good.

One might think that knowing that he survives and what he has to do to get free before hand would dull the impact of the film as you aren’t sitting there wondering if he will make it out but the film is so intense and draws you in so much that this is never a problem. It helps that Danny Boyle is the sort of director who can make taking drink out of a camelback visually exciting so a dude stuck in a crevice with his hand under a boulder never becomes boring or dull.

The soundtrack is expertly chosen and implemented here and compliment the visuals in just the right way. Like everything else in the movie, the music hits the mark directly and helps bring all the other elements together.

Of course, all the technical expertise in the world couldn’t have saved this movie if James Franco had failed to compel as Ralston. Luckily we are in very good hands here as his performance is pretty much perfect. He doesn’t have a lot of screen time to convey Ralston’s confidence and attitude before the accident but Franco manages to pull it off. After the accident the whole movie is pretty much on him and he carries it without a hitch. He had a lot of material to base his performance off of but that shouldn’t take away from what he accomplishes here. If you don’t buy into him then the movie fails. This movie did not fail.

Conclusion [10 out of 10]

127 Hours is a great film that takes what could have been a dry slog and turns it into an intense and visually arresting experience. This film has earned its place as one of the best pictures of 2010 and deserves any awards it may win.