Bolivia's Chacaltaya today - all the snow has disappeared

No Will Smith – just a real threat of extinction

December 5, 2014

LA PAZ, BOLIVIA - Chacaltaya’s days are numbered. Nestled away in the Bolivian Andes, the glacier has existed for 18,000 years, but over the last two decades most of it has melted away.

Edson Ramirez is the country’s leading glaciologist.

Sitting in his office at the University of San Andres in La Paz, he gestures to the narrow streets below. Many from his hometown and nearby El Alto depend on tropical ice fields like Chacaltaya for their water, he says.

His youthful face dulls momentarily. It’s rising temperatures, he says – that’s why it’s disappearing.

Like everyone else, I know how this movie ends.

And it's just really gross. But kind of cool too.

It's based on a guy called Aron Ralston, a young adrenalin junkie who goes canyoning in the wilds of Utah, solo - without telling a soul.

Spoiler alert: early on in the film Aron, played by James Franco, dislodges a boulder, plunges down a crevice, and gets pinned by the same rock.

And that rock ain't going nowhere, no-how.

Directed by Danny Boyle of Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire fame, the film is based on Ralston's book Between a Rock and a Hard Place.

A title that sums up his gory tale, and the movie's story arc.

Boyle is awesome at branding his films with powerful imagery geared towards a hyperactive media-crazed instant gratification audience.

From the kick-off the movie goes full-throttle as Aron recklessly sets off on his adventure: hurtling down the highway in a beat up car while his headphones blast pulsing beats.

“Boyle has a real knack for branding his films with powerful imagery geared towards a hyperactive media-crazed instant gratification audience.”

Within the same heartbeat he's on his mountain bike as the stunningly bleak mars-like Utah landscape flashes by.

He meets some babes. Shows them an subterranean lake only accessible by slipping down a groin-tinglingly narrow rift. Then he's off, pumped on nature, fresh air and the rush of living life to its fullest...

Then Aron slips. He's now trapped.

Frozen in time and space by nature: the drug that has always pushed him to dizzying heights.

Camera zooms on Aron's stunned face and the Movie title appears for the first time: 127 Hours.

Brake is applied heavily now for momentum-loving viewers - or is it?

Sometimes this film was hard to watch (and for a few nerve-snapping moments - unbearable).

Franco does great credit to Aron's gritty determination, and Boyle doesn't rely on sentimentality or melodrama.

It's like a companion piece to Sean Penn's Into the Wild, but thankfully here the hero survives.

Like Into the Wild's care-free hero, for Aron it's the people in his life, and the premonition of his future son, which gives him the courage and down-right ballsy-ness to, literally, disarm himself to break free.

So yeah - he gruesomely and noisily hacks off his own limb. But as he's scrambles out of the crevasse, one arm down, he looks back at the rock and says 'Thank you'.

Then he snaps a selfie of his dismembered hand with his membered hand.

Through the entire film Aron stays level-headed and never loses his great love of nature and even the very rock that so nearly entombed him.

This is a powerful film, and a tribute to the importance of human love and the brutal and unforgiving beauty of the wild.

“Through the entire film Aron stays level-headed and never loses his great love of nature and even the very rock that so nearly entombed him. ”