Here's About 90 Seconds of “127 Hours”

The first footage of "127 Hours," starring James Franco as the real-life God-among-Men who hacked off his own arm to escape being pinned by a boulder at the bottom of a canyon, has arrived. Gotta hand it to 'em, they've managed to put together a reasonably light, fun teaser for an impossibly grim story.

Franco plays Aron Ralston, who in 2003 found himself with his right arm trapped under a large rock while hiking near Moab, Utah. Over the next 127 hours he videotaped a daily diary, began drinking his urine after running out of water, and carved himself a headstone in the canyon wall before deciding he had only one hope for survival.

“It occurred to me I could break my bones,” Ralston told the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “I was able to first snap the radius and then within another few minutes snap the ulna at the wrist and from there, I had the knife out and applied the tourniquet and went to task. It was a process that took about an hour.”

Director Danny Boyle has acknowledged that Ralston's story, while gripping, heroic and inspiring, is a tough sell, especially for film.

"It's a lovely way of doing a new kind of filmmaking, really," Boyle told Empire in discussing the YouTube-like nature of the film. "We want it to be a challenge to you [the audience] to see if you can sit and watch it."

Frankly, just writing the second graf of this piece was "challenging," actually watching Franco and Boyle recreate Ralston's story is daunting.

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