Don’t leave home without it

Wrote most of this last week after watching this movie. I’m a huge dork and this post is way too long.

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Watched 127 Hours tonight with friends and my mom/Ben who are visiting for the weekend. The Oscars it’s won recently speak for themselves and I have to agree–it is a really great movie. I think it could also be described as an interactive movie as it keeps you (literally) on the edge of your seat, gagging, shuddering, laughing, hoping, wincing, and just generally “feeling” something the whole way through. And it wasn’t just me!  At more than one part, most of us would have our heads in our hands, shouting at the screen, not believing what was happening.I am a self-proclaimed “sleeper-during-the-movies” but not during this one.

127 Hours is the real-life story of Aaron Ralston whose routine hike becomes a nightmare after he is trapped in a crevice for well, 127 hours. The movie opens with a messily filmed scene of him running around his aparment throwing some hiking necessitites into a pack. His mom leaves him a voicemail in the background after he doesn’t answer the phone. While his Nalgene bottle fills up and overflows with tap water, he scurries around feeling for his Swiss Army knife in a cabinet only to give up the search (not realizing it was just out of grasp further back on the shelf). Aron  sleeps in his truck, documents his thrills on a cheap movie camera, and rides a mountain bike in the orange dessert surrounded by the fateful canyons.

You get a sense for Aron’s character early on in the movie; daredevil, independent, charming, flirtatious, with a generous helping of “devil-may-care” mixed with “happy-go-lucky”.

His problems start when he slips into a ravine and is followed by a Biblical sized rock which lands, HARD ,on his arm, leaving him trapped, literally, between a rock and a hard place. He spends most of the movie right there. Unlike other films where characters are trapped in one place (i.e. Castaway and The Black Stallion) and there’s no talking and you just watch them try catch fish in their underwear, 127 Hours has plenty of dialogue and the scenery changes lots as Aron flashes back to good and bad memories and records his situation on the video camera.

Things go from bad to worse quickly and most of us on the room were on the edges of our seats, when we weren’t on the verge of gagging from some of the desperate survival measures. Two words: Urine, Camelback.

By the 5th day he is really sick. His arm is still trapped, he has run out of water, and nobody knows that he’s gone. He regrets not answering his mom’s call.  And as the situation grows more desperate, he begins to seriously consider cutting the lower half of his arm off. We knew from reviews that the scene was coming. What I didn’t know is that he first tries unsuccessfully with his crappy non-Swiss Army-knife. Eventually he resorts to plunging in a blunt edge of the knife and breaking his bone. It’s downhill from there and I’ll spare anyone unfortunate enough to still be reading the grizzly details.

Going to try to wrap this up. Basically the end of the movie is what made me want to say/write something about it in the first place. When you see the trailers for the film, it kind of looks like any action/adventure/stuck in the wilderness gig but I thought this one was really thoughtful and deeper than “he cut off his arm and survived!”. As Aaron suffers delusions from sickness etc his flashbacks convey some of what he is and isn’t. He is an adrenaline junkie, he’s had no shortage of adventure and he doesn’t rely on anyone, ask for help or have deep relationships.

After cutting off his arm, he stumbles back from the couple of square feet he’s inhabited for the past 5 days. It’s a gory sort of freedom. He can leave but can’t take all of him with him. I know it’s cliche but I thought it was a powerful scene.

For me, the climax of the movie is the very end. He emerges from the ravine bloody, dehydrated, and barely in his right mind. After drinking some putrid looking water he sees a family hiking in the distance. He mouthes words to them but is to weak to make any noise. And then finally, in this really great moment of drama and conclusion yells at them with the kind of desperation that must only come from those who have just amputated a limb with a pocket knife for help.

The great Aaron Ralston learns to ask for help. He only had to lose an appendage and almost die. Let us take note.

Watch this movie.