They might want to offer smelling salts at the refreshment counters of the aters showing “127 Hours,” as there have been widespread reports of audience members passing out.
It’s during a scene where hiker Aron Ralston (played by James Franco), who’s been trapped for days in a remote canyon when a boulder falls on his arm, finally severs the mangled limb to escape.
Two people fainted or collapsed at the Telluride Film Festival, three at the Toronto International Film Festival and four at an advance screening at Pixar Animation, the Los Angeles Times reports.
“I felt like I was going to throw up,” Courtney Phelps, who grew ill at a Producers Guild of America screening in Hollywood, told the Times. “So I went to the bathroom, and then I started feeling dizzy and my heart started racing.”
There’s no getting around that about 75 minutes into “127 Hours,” you’ll find the most intense scene in any movie this year, possibly excepting “Saw 3-D.”
While it took Ralston something like 30 minutes to sever his arm, the film scene doesn’t actually last more than a couple of minutes. But it feels a whole lot longer. There is some gore, yes, but what really got to me are the sound effects — the sound of Ralston twisting the knife to break the bones in his arm so he can twist himself free from his rocky prison.
I should add that in the hands of an artist like director Danny Boyle, it all fits in context — it’s the inevitable final outcome in an amazing story of survival.
As Franco put it in an interview: “Danny really had to balance that scene. You can go too far and just have it be gratuitous gore, and it’s almost like a horror movie. Or you can cut away and make it maybe a little more watchable, but then that takes away from what Aron went through.”