The true story of a young dreamer, Philippe Petit, and a band of unlikely recruits who together achieve the impossible: an illegal wire walk in the immense void between the World Trade Center towers. With little more than nerve and blind ambition, Petit and his ragtag crew overcome daunting physical obstacles, betrayals, countless close calls and overwhelming odds to beat the system and execute their mad plan.
As his career has gone on, I’ve found that Robert Zemeckis has moved further and further away from more thinky movies into crowd-pleasing blockbusters, and that’s exactly what I predict his new film The Walk will be. A fictional re-telling of Phillipe Petit, the subject of the documentary Man on Wire, The Walk stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt doing an OUTRRRRRRAGEOUS FRENCH ACCENT as he plans a heist-style caper to walk a tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center. Honestly, I don’t think this looks too bad. It’s going to be fluffy movie theatre fare, but the one thing that I think it really could have going for it is the 3D. If the 3D depth effects in this movie are done well, the viewer could get a serious case of vertigo looking down from atop those enormous towers. I can’t say I’m excited to watch the movie, but this is a case where I may just have to make a trip to the theatre, if only because I know The Walk will be nowhere near as good on a small screen. See also Gravity.
The Walk comes out October 2, 2015.