For many years, Steve Irwin had amassed great fame and fortune by handling wild and dangerous beasts for his own passion and for the education of home viewers. All of that came to an end in early 2006, when he attempted to handle a stingray that fatally stung him. Only three years earlier, the famed lion tamer Roy Horn was viciously and unexpectedly attacked by a white tiger that he and his partner, Sigfried Fischbacher, had raised since the tiger was a cub. These are not the first such incidents and they certainly won’t be the last.

The point being that mankind has always sought to harness nature. There have always been people brave or foolhardy enough to make a living out of conquering and taming the wilderness. Yet no matter how practiced or confident such people may be, there’s no changing the fact that Mother Nature in all of her forms is a cruel and unpredictable bitch.

So here’s 127 Hours, the true story of yet another man who learns this the hard way. Aron Ralston, as played by James Franco, is shown pretty much immediately to be someone who calls the Utah desert his home. This is a guy who knows every rock and every hill, enjoying a euphoric mix of danger and comfort as he climbs and bikes where there is no beaten path. He’s also shown to be quite a smooth and arrogant charmer when he briefly crosses paths with a couple of beautiful coed hikers.

But then things go downhill (so to speak) when Ralston traps his right hand under a boulder he accidentally dislodged in a narrow canyon. He spends over five days trapped in that canyon, gradually suffering from dehydration, starvation, disrupted circulation and dementia until he finally frees himself by cutting off his right hand.

The drastic means of escape might be a spoiler in any other movie, but not here. Rather, the movie seems to have been made on the assumption that the audience already knows the eventual outcome. That he cuts off his own hand is not a spoiler, nor is the length of time until he does so (it’s the title of the movie, for God’s sake). Instead, the tension of this movie is in how Ralston manages to successfully cut through his bone and sinew with nothing but a dull pocketknife and live to tell about it.

In the meantime, Ralston is stuck by himself in the canyon under a giant rock. He’s off the beaten path in the middle of a desert, with no one in screaming distance and no cell phone reception. To that end, this is pretty much a one-man show, which is something very difficult for a filmmaker to do. Fortunately, our one man is James Franco and his director is Danny Fucking Boyle.

To start with, the first thing that Ralston does when he realizes that he’s stuck and no one’s coming is that he takes inventory. He takes out everything in his pack and lays it on the boulder. From that point on, every inanimate object in the vicinity is treated as a character in itself. The boulder is obviously his firm and unyielding antagonist. His camcorder is his only companion. His pocketknife is treated as a useless but indispensable assistant and his water bottle… well, I won’t bother trying to describe the way that water is filmed in this movie. Suffice to say that Boyle effectively shows us exactly what any liquid would look like to a man dying of thirst.

Boyle and Franco work together in perfect harmony to show us exactly what’s going on in Ralston’s head. We literally see his life flashing before his eyes. We see his desperation, his suffering and perhaps most importantly, his humor. Perhaps my favorite sequence in the movie is when Ralston addresses his camcorder as if he was hosting, guest appearing and calling in to a morning talk show. There are cuts and slight angle changes to show when Ralston is playing different “characters.” Boyle even throws in a laugh track and some music to match what’s likely playing in Ralston’s head. This is the self-deprecating and humorous way in which Ralston makes fun of his situation, specifically that no one knows where he is and he’ll likely be dead by the time the police start looking for him. This gives way to an awkward silence, after which the act fades away and he starts leaving apologies on the camcorder. That sequence is essentially the movie in a nutshell, and there’s simply no substitute for watching it.

Boyle employs no shortage of tricks to wring every last drop out of this premise. For example, the hallucinations are frequent and wonderfully used, from dreams of escape to a giant inflatable Scooby-Doo (it makes sense in context, trust me). The flashbacks and visions of Ralston’s possible future serve a dual purpose, fleshing out Ralston as a character while showing just how far gone he is. It’s great character development, it’s clear illustration of the stakes, it’s immersion into Ralston’s state of mind, it’s a way to make him sympathetic and it’s a device to momentarily change scenery, all in one. Absolutely brilliant.

Then there’s the score. A.R. Rahman has earned a world of kudos for the music and lack of it in this film. So many of the film’s greatest scenes — particularly that gruesome and painful amputation near the end — are made great because of Rahman’s work. The general sound design is likewise amazing, especially when Ralston first cries for help and we see precisely how isolated he is.

Though I’ve already talked about the visuals at length, Boyle has such an amazing visual skill that I have to talk about them some more. Specifically, Boyle gets his cameras everywhere. Not only do we see Franco from every possible angle within that tiny canyon, but we also see the inside of his water bottle, the inner workings of his camcorder and even the blood vessel where his pocketknife hits bone. Boyle also has a trick in which he splits the screen into three vertical segments with a different shot for each. This takes a while to get used to, especially since the approach is so unfocused when it’s first used, but it becomes vital later on. At the end of the second act, the thirds all show different shots of Ralston and they’re constantly changing in random order. This does a lot to discombobulate the audience and confound our sense of how much time has passed, something that Ralston himself surely experienced at that particular point in the story.

127 Hours is an amazing movie in every possible way. It was founded on a real-life story of isolation, desperation and delirium, made painfully immersive by Franco’s emoting and Boyle’s keen directorial creativity. This isn’t always an easy movie to watch, but it’s still thrilling and masterfully made. I totally recommend it.