Seeing a Danny Boyle movie is like seeing someone bust a gut
telling an anecdote. It’s like a colleague relating something that happened to
them at the weekend, but hiring an orchestra to accompany them. It’s like
Christ! That was incredible! But then the euphoria fades, and you can’t help
feeling they’ve spent too much effort turning a three minute pop song into a
symphony. Take Boyle’s latest film 127 Hours. It’s about a rock climber who
wedges his arm between a boulder and a cliff face, and spends five days trying
to free himself. Boyle uses every conceivable trick to make a mountain from his
mole hill. He inserts panoramic shots of the desert that start with the climber
in his crack in the cliff, thereby illustrating his smallness in comparison to
the earth. He inserts shots of marathons and crowds of people at football games,
thereby illustrating the climber’s isolation from human kind. He inserts a rock
soundtrack and close-up shots of the climber prior to his accident, thereby
illustrating his mistaken belief that nothing can harm him. These are all good
things. But ultimately, Boyle never convinces us this is anything but some dude
relating his bad weekend. It never becomes about the character, but remains
about the situation. It means I might gasp and stare for as
long as he’s telling the story, but once it’s over I’m not going to give it
another thought. For all Boyle’s technical mastery, the film is
ultimately trivial.
