Review: 127 Hours

Tweet

Genre: Drama

Actor James Franco flies mostly solo in this never boring new feature by director Danny Boyle, would read my review if I were a boring writer. Fortunately, I am not and shall spare you reader the humdrum descriptors. All that really need be said about Mr. Boyle's 127 Hours is that, the considerable talents of director and leading actor aside, the film lacks creative verve. Because starry memories and pellucid flashes are the somewhat gaudy, somewhat hackneyed vehicles by which the film chooses to escape from its literally confined physical circumstances, it distances itself from rather than approximates the superpresent features of psychical, social existence that it needs to self-sustain, that he the protagonist needs to self-sustain. Now, I am not saying that this type of vehicle by its very nature is inconducive of psychosocial commentary relative to earthly-physical narration; I only contest that the vehicle is so inconducive at odds with a copresent narrative device, precedent by its greater diegesis within the story. This device, the post-modern self-testament delivered directly to the camera's camera by the protagonist in vain self-catalogizing, constructs a distinctive atmosphere, unfriendly to an iconographically friendly idolizing in earnest. Iridescent, halo-like framings of ideas manifest in supernatural space contrast against unrepressedly forcedly grounded double-imaginings of their necessarily embodied originator combatively, not collaboratively. This contrast is the film's macro-schematic pothole.
Otherwise:

Grade: B, good active cinema.