Review: 127 Hours v The Way Back

Two survival movies based on fact, two directors, two very different approaches: ladies and gentlemen, tonight on Movie Death Match Special, it’s Danny Boyle’s post-Slumdog one-armed special, 127 Hours, up against Peter Weir’s ensemble piece,The Way Back, his first effort since Master & Commander seven years ago.

Boyle went from famine to feast with Slumdog: Sunshine, though generally well received, had flopped and Slumdog went into its first festival screening without a distributor; six months later, the film had garnered eight Oscars and hauled in $362m at the worldwide box office. So, no pressure for Boyle on his follow-up then!

Let’s deal with the positives: James Franco is great, oscillating through every known human emotion (including one I was not expecting him to experience) as he remains trapped on his own in a canyon fissure; his gradual descent into madness and his climb back out again to self-realisation and eventually physical freedom is played out as a series of vignettes.

When the big moment comes and he cuts the arm off, I was as tense as I have ever been watching a film; the bone-breaking sound effects and the chainsaw buzz employed when he makes the final cut had me wanting to rip my own head off – it’s strong stuff. But crucially, I think Boyle has been true to his aim and neither underplayed nor overplayed that scene.

AH Rahman’s score is perfect too.

The negatives? Well, as with Slumdog, Boyle takes a somewhat shallow script and throws every weapon in his considerable directorial arsenal at it – too such an extent that it overpowers the script and almost Franco’s performance to boot. Filmed from perpetually crazy angles (I await the day Boyle shoots on the horizontal for the hell of it) and crazy places (Franco drinks from his water bottle – we view from inside the bottom of the bottle), the visuals and the editing are simply too much. And we fairly hurtle through the story as well.

Boyle’s not about to drop off my radar like Inarritu (Alejandro, you are not a brand!), although this Hitchcock for the MTV generation needs to chill a little and take a more thoughtful approach and serve the script in future.

Peter Weir is the absolute antithesis of Boyle: the script must be served, and any chutzpah of his own is used to sparingly to amplify the story and the characters. The Way Back tells the apparently true story of the 4,000km trek to India by a number of Siberian gulag escapees in WWII.

As with 127 Hours, we know the outcome even as the film starts, so the enjoyment (if that’s the right word) is in the journey. And what a strange journey it is.

Such a long trek through every dangerous terrain you can think of could easily be over-dramatised, every step being a flirtation with fate; instead Weir chooses, almost perversely, to under-dramatise the events, taking a low key approach to his shooting and the characterisation.

In the latter he is aided by an excellent, international ensemble cast, most notably Ed Harris and Jim Sturgess. Harris excels in the film’s key moment, when the motley crew stop for a rest by a stream and the young runaway, who has joined them, without bidding washes Harris’s feet; the stoic Harris’s initial shock at such human kindness collapses into despair and relief as he realises its been so long since he could allow such an act into his life: he tells Sturgess, on his first day in the gulag, that "kindness can kill you". It’s a deeply moving moment, again under-played, but Weir cuts away almost too quickly to the next scene.

The runaway (Saoirse Ronan of Atonement fame) helps to realise the unspoken bond between the escapees, and give it voice – an essential move if they are to survive.

The gang don’t all get along all the time, but their enemy (if there can be said to be one in this film) is nature – she absolutely will not stop, etc.

The film clocks in at 133 minutes, but that’s not enough time to avoid the film becoming episodic: there’s so much story to tell, but so little time to tell it – the scenes aren’t necessarily rushed, but they are necessarily short.

Ultimately, The Way Back has a slowburn effect, and, I suspect, will age better than 127 Hours. So a narrow victory to Weir (aided by the wallop of the film's coda - something 127 Hours lacks), then. In conclusion, I can only wonder how each film would have turned out if the directors had swapped jobs…
127 Hours: 7.5/10
The Way Back: 8/10