I know I’m a bad person because I laughed through some cable TV show (possibly I Can’t Believe I Survived That or Look at Me Defeat Darwinism! or True Tales of People Who Get Famous For Doing Dumb Shit That Should Have, By All Rights, Killed Them) that featured interviews with Aron Ralston and re-enactments of his ordeal wherein he got his arm caught under a boulder and then had to cut it off with his own knife. And I thought what a really great scene in a movie that would make – a dude just sawing off his own arm with a crappy knife, having to break his own bones, just to free himself from Utah (well, and a boulder in Utah beneath which he was trapped).
But I wasn’t thinking big enough! Danny Boyle doesn’t just see this as a scene in a movie – he sees it as an entire movie. The director is making Ralston’s story his next film. 127 Hours is the title (and assuredly not the running time, but I’m sure Collider’s Frosty will get the scoop on that soon enough), and it reteams Boyle with his friends at Fox Searchlight.
I’m sure Ralston’s a nice guy and I’m sure it took a lot to cut off his own arm and then hike out of the canyon, but this one of those stories I can’t get behind simply because the guy made his own fate. He didn’t tell anybody he was going ‘canyoneering,’ and he went all by himself. When a boulder dislodged and crushed his arm he was stuck simply because he hadn’t been smart in advance. He’d still have an arm if he had just told someone where he was going, because when he never came back people would have searched for him. But instead he got a book deal, a movie deal and a whole bunch of media attention. And now he has to jerk off with his other hand.