Thoughts: 127 Hours vs. Saw

To start off, let's get something straight. 127 Hours is a great movie. I'm sad I waited so long to see it. It's beautifully made and artistically unique. James Franco finds a way to capture the audience while being the only person on screen for the majority of the film.

The Saw franchise, on the other hand, is a bunch of films ranging from "not very good" to "downright awful." As one of the characters in the latest Scream film says, "I don't like the Saw movies. They're not even scary, they're just gross.. and there's no character development, so I don't even care." That about sums it up. Although, the other viewpoint, given by Utah's Radio From Hell show, is this, "There's something gratifying about going home after a long week of work, sitting down, and watching terrible people get tortured, it's nice." As funny as that is, part of me actually agrees with it, even though they are terrible movies.

Movies about losing limbs always need to have triangle symbolism...

The interesting thing about these two films is that they're based around the same idea - What are you willing to do and how much pain are you willing to go through to survive?

So even though they are based on the same idea, what makes 127 Hours a good movie and Saw(s) a bad movie?

Let's break it down the Scream way.

First Complaint: "Not even scary" - Saw isn't scary because you don't care. It blatantly puts everything in front of you and doesn't leave a lot to the imagination. While 127 Hours isn't necessarily scary, it does do a good job of creating suspense and intrigue through past experiences and clever dialogue.

Second Complaint: "No character development" Saw has so many characters that are continually dying that you don't get a chance to understand who they are. The most you ever find out is that they did something terrible and now they are going to get punished for it. Also, there's no real good guys in the series, it's so sick and twisted that you even find yourself cheering for Jigsaw (the mastermind) at certain points. As mentioned before, 127 Hours is about a guy who has his arm stuck under a rock. A mastermind killing people sounds much more interesting than this, but through flashbacks and cleverly edited scenes, you grow to care about James Franco's character and all the things in his life that led up to his horrible circumstance. You care, therefore it's interesting.

Third and Final Complaint: "It's just gross" The gore that parades itself through the Saw series may give you an initial exhilaration when first experienced, but very quickly it becomes nasty and painful to watch. When they're finally done cutting off whichever limb, you think to yourself "eww, I can't believe I survived watching that scene." What's interesting about 127 Hours is that when he finally gets his arm off, you find this sense of relief, the camera finally becomes less stationary and you feel.. free. That was a huge surprise to me. Even more surprising, while he is cutting off his arm, you feel a sense of emotional sadness and pain, not just a gross-out effect.

While these two movies are based around the same idea, they take two different roads of explaining it. We need more films that can take a simple idea and make it into an emotionally deep journey. Hats off to you, 127 Hours.