Movie Thoughts: 127 Hours (2010)

• Released: 4 September 2010
• Directed by: Danny Boyle
• Running time: 1 h 34 min
• Rating 4/5

Synopsis

Based on true events. A man gets his arm stuck below a large boulder while traversing a canyon and now must find a way to free himself.

My Thoughts

I've seen parts of this movie before, but was never allowed to watch it in full by my parents due to the graphic nature of some scenes. And after having seen it, I totally get why. 

I am not a squeamish person. I do taxidermy for fun sometimes (including the skinning part) and have a pretty strong stomach for body/flesh stuff. But the scene where Aron had to amputate his own arm was...well, really tough to watch. Each time he cut one of his tendons I audibly winced. Like, they don't shy away from showing the graphic details of the amputation.

But that aside, the movie is also really good. I kind of expected it to get boring after a while because while the premise is interesting, it really does boil down to a guy being stuck in the exact same spot for almost the entire movie. But the way things were shot and the events that kept happening to him thoroughly kept me engaged. 

I also like how the movie just pretty much cut to the chase pretty soon. We see Aron goofing off with some girls in the first ten minutes or so, but he pretty much instantly gets stuck after that. I really expected this movie to start with some exposition setting up his relationship to his family or whatnot, but the movie is just really about him and his situation, as it should be. 

The ending is dark but ultimately uplifting, which was also really needed because after one and a half hour of misery for our main character he deserved some good to happen to him. True to life, Aron ended up amputating his own arm after failing to remove the boulder. He'd been stuck below that rock for days at that point.

Overall a really intense movie. Not for the squeamish but I'm glad I saw it.