The Walk (Robert Zemeckis, 2015)

[flyonthewall2983]

First look at Robert Zemeckis' The Walk.

[mfunk9786]

I am not a big fan of a lot of Zemeckis' tech-ier work, but that looks fucking awesome. I can't think of anything deeper to say on the matter. It has a chance to be a truly incredible must-see-in-3D spectacle a la Gravity.

[hearthesilence]

J. Hoberman wrote a feature for the NYTimes on Zemeckis' upcoming retrospective at MoMA as well as The Walk which kicks off the NYFF this weekend.

I have to admit, the (all-digital?) re-creation of that event (specifically the Twin Towers) looks stupendous, even in the few glimpses that's been given in theatrical trailers. I wouldn't be surprised if the VFX alone topped anything he ever did. What it all adds up to though, we'll have to see.

[hearthesilence]

The extended climax of The Walk (pretty much the last 20 minutes) has been winning unanimous raves, but the consensus is that the rest (especially the first half hour or so) isn't so hot, even excruciating for all the wrong reasons.

[Alan Smithee]

I can definitely echo those sentiments. I don't know if I'd only give the last 20 minutes credit but it definitely is a bit tedious and cliched before the final "heist" is in motion. Petite's girlfriend character is one-dimensional, as are all of the supporting players, particularly the most ludicrous stoner caricature I've seen. Petits background isn't particularly interesting and certainly suffers from his self-mythologizing. JGL does ok, Ben Kingsley's pretty good and Zemeckis keeps it moving fast enough that you don't notice just how bad everything is until it's over.

That said, the recreation of the actual setup and execution of the walk is top notch and gives the film every reason to exist.

[hearthesilence]

Zemeckis keeps it moving fast enough that you don't notice just how bad everything is until it's over.

Oy, sometimes I think the best commercial directors in Hollywood have been reduced to that nowadays - minimizing how bad everything seems while you're watching the movie. (And hope people don't mull the film over afterwards.)

[flyonthewall2983]

Reports of people suffering from vertigo as throwing up during screenings.

[Ribs]

I really don't know what they were expecting when seeing a movie with a climax so openly set as so great a height in 3D or Imax. It's totally on the audience for not expecting this to happen to them.

[cdnchris]

I took my wife to see Everest (meh) and it was on a very large screen. I'm terrified of heights yet I don't think there was a moment throughout the film where I felt any sort of panic or stress (though admittedly I can't think of any film that has done that to me). They showed the trailer for The Walk before the film, and there was like a 1 to 2-second high angle shot of him walking across the wire and I felt a severe amount of anxiety during that one moment, more than the entirety of Everest, so I guess I'm not surprised people (especially those suffering from vertigo) are reacting to prolonged sequences of that. I decided after that trailer if I do watch The Walk (and the reviews seem very mixed) it will have to be on video, so like Ribs I would have to wonder why people who know how they react to such things would put themselves through something like that.

[swo17]

Yes, there have been so many movies made like this in the past, people should have learned their lessons by now.

[Adam X]

Shortly after it was released, the cinema I saw Dancer in the Dark at posted signs warning audience members of the potential for motion sickness while viewing the film.

[tenia]

The only explanation I have is that people didn't expect Zemeckis to be able to craft this part so well it would be so powerful regarding heights/vertigo.
Like Chris wrote, Everest for instance is very poor at doing so, I guess the viewers thought The Walk would have a small impact too.

Otherwise, I can't see why somebody would inflict this to himself (and then rant about his own stupidity but that's an other story).

[mfunk9786]

Shortly after it was released, the cinema I saw Dancer in the Dark at posted signs warning audience members of the potential for motion sickness while viewing the film.

No one warned me that I'd be uncontrollably weeping for 2 days after I saw that one.

[lacritfan]

Shortly after it was released, the cinema I saw Dancer in the Dark at posted signs warning audience members of the potential for motion sickness while viewing the film.

I remember feeling queasy after Blair Witch Project and heard it was because at the time when digital was transferred to film it had a motion sickness effect on some people. (Fill in your own reason-BWP-made-me-queasy-for-a-different-reason joke here).

[Adam X]

No one warned me that I'd be uncontrollably weeping for 2 days after I saw that one.

I guess emotionally traumatised patrons were in no state to complain afterwards.

[Lost Highway]

I saw the documentary Man on Wire when it came out and I must have been one of the few people not charmed by it, mainly because I found Petit absolutely insufferable. Not sure if a fictionalised version is going to be better or worse. I am intrigued by the last 20 minutes as that's exactly what the documentary couldn't show, but I may still be rooting for him to trip and fall.

Zemeckis is a funny one for me. He is a little like a lesser Spielberg and I sometimes get him mixed up with Ron Howard, though what he does mostly worked for me until he took a long detour into Uncanny Valley, churning out a number of hideous motion capture films which dated as he was making them. I'm quite fond of Contact though. Despite that I'll judged beach scene there is enough left of Sagan for the film to evoke a sense of wonder about space which reminded me of Close Encounters and Jodie Foster gives what I think is her best performance. My favourite film of his is the underrated Death Becomes Her, that opening musical number alone is pure genius. It was the film which finally made me appreciate and possibly even fall in love with Meryl Streep.

[thirtyframesasecond]

What I found odd about the trailer was the "from Academy Award Winning Director: Robert Zemeckis.....director of Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Flight"....with no mention of BACK TO THE FUTURE. And that was even without Joseph Gordon Levitt's Clouseau-esque accent.

[Ribs]

I think it's just them trying to establish it as a serious prestige-y picture. A bit like how ads for Lincoln wouldn't mention Jaws.

[hearthesilence]

Probably right, I'm pretty sure any marketing person would argue that the films you mention have to pair up well with what you're selling. Still, it's an amusing thought considering that Zemeckis' most commercial films - I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Used Cars, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? - are much better films than his ostensible "prestige" work.

[bearcuborg]

Shortly after it was released, the cinema I saw Dancer in the Dark at posted signs warning audience members of the potential for motion sickness while viewing the film.

No one warned me that I'd be uncontrollably weeping for 2 days after I saw that one.

Really? I read it as a provocative farce of the down trodden American citizens seen through the eyes of a clumsy filmmaker. At no point did I feel anything genuine. Then again, I've found only a few of his passable at best. Though his work of late as at least made his sense of humor a bit more pronounced. This one at least had Bjork in her prime.

I couldn't muster up much enthusiasm for the documentary that precedes The Walk, but I'm a huge Zmeckis fan. Based on the stuff I'm reading here, I have to go for the last 20mins at least. Pretty much the same reason I saw Flight, but for the plane crash at the beginning.

[whaleallright]

He is a little like a lesser Spielberg…

For at least as long as he was collaborating with Bob Gale, Zemeckis’s films had an irreverance, a punchiness, a crassness, and a tightly-wound narrative efficiency that was quite distinctive, and that few of Spielberg’s films could touch. I think that once he started chasing Oscars and stopped working with Gale, his films began to pander a lot more, and lost that sense of breathtaking efficiency (as well as much of their humor). He’s still one of the most accomplished mainstream filmmakers around, and I'll see most anything he does, but his films increasingly seem to exist for the sake of show-stopping set pieces.

[Lost Highway]

Shortly after it was released, the cinema I saw Dancer in the Dark at posted signs warning audience members of the potential for motion sickness while viewing the film.

No one warned me that I'd be uncontrollably weeping for 2 days after I saw that one.

Really? I read it as a provocative farce of the down trodden American citizens seen through the eyes of a clumsy filmmaker. At no point did I feel anything genuine. Then again, I've found only a few of his passable at best. Though his work of late as at least made his sense of humor a bit more pronounced. This one at least had Bjork in her prime.

Same here, the only way I could understand Dancer in the Dark was as a comedy where the joke was on the audence who fell for its ludicrous manipulations.

He is a little like a lesser Spielberg…

For at least as long as he was collaborating with Bob Gale, Zemeckis’s films had an irreverance, a punchiness, a crassness, and a tightly-wound narrative efficiency that was quite distinctive, and that few of Spielberg’s films could touch. I think that once he started chasing Oscars and stopped working with Gale, his films began to pander a lot more, and lost that sense of breathtaking efficiency (as well as much of their humor). He’s still one of the most accomplished mainstream filmmakers around, and I'll see most anything he does, but his films increasingly seem to exist for the sake of show-stopping set pieces.

I find his early movies like I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Romancing the Stone and even Back to the Future slightly bland when compared to Spielbergs early work like The Sugarland Express, Jaws or Close Encounters. When it comes to movie brat punchiness and crassness I turned to De Palma or Joe Dante rather than to Zemeckis. I agree with you though that at least since he returned from motion capture his films appear to revolve around one set piece.

[mfunk9786]

This was very lightweight but enjoyable cinema-as-spectacle. For his reputation, Zemeckis never struck me as the most cotton candy type of filmmaker (I really think higher level sociological commentary tends to be on his mind more than one might give him credit for, however [un]successful at times), but this was 95% lovable confection and 5% on-the-nose music cues and should've known better portrayals of 70s archetypes, instead of the other way around.

Not everything works (Kingsley's character is DOA; the movie ends about 5 minutes too late while it fumbles to eulogize the World Trade Center, as if their destruction was ever tragic because of the buildings themselves rather than the human beings inside), but if you give yourself in to the idea that you're seeing a theme park ride without moving in your chair (aside from 'jeeeeeeeeeeeeez I am uncomfortable with what I'm seeing because it is terrifying' squirming), you'll have a very good time. It's no masterpiece, and it'd take a lot more important source material to be a great or important film, but it would take a huge grouch to take a ton of issue with it. See it in IMAX 3D the way you did Gravity and expect to have a similar experience, just admiring the sort of journeys these soulless digital formats can take us on when they effort to do so. This is much better than any superhero movie, at least.

[colinr0380]

Can I be the huge grouch mfunk? I'm curious about how you feel the film deals with the issues below:

Without having seen either of the films yet (though I’m unsure that either are going to provide me with the answers that I’m looking for! I think my issues are inherent with the source material itself), I’m having a hard time untangling my feelings about The Walk with those about Everest. Mostly I’m trying to understand the point of eulogising either the events that occur or the people doing them. Or for making the films themselves! This is likely my unadventurous side coming out, but I need something more than “because it’s there! [loud whoop]” to inspire my empathy in these cases!

I wonder what has caused the release of two films quite close together about people putting themselves in harm’s way entirely because they choose to, not because they’ve been forced into that situation through circumstance (when there could be films made about both locations with people who have to be there, rather than who are on some sort of bucket list life goal to do something). In some ways I think that I’m going to have fewer problems with Everest due to the apparently unforeseen weather changes causing the tragedy, but this is apparently still a film about people putting themselves consciously into such a situation and then asking the audience to feel for them when the inevitable happens.

The Walk feels as if it will be worse in a way, as even the quest to conquer a high naturally occurring point is not there any more (though The Walk is replacing that obsession of ‘being one of the few’ with ‘being first’ to do an act. Replacing one way of showing off with another?), and becomes an act divorced of context in some ways.

Isn’t The Walk going to be inherently undramatic, except for those afraid of extreme heights? Petit’s mission to walk from one tower of the World Trade Center to the other cannot really end in tragedy, and it seems slightly strange (I felt this in Man on Wire) to see a mercenary stunt elevated into an uplifting metaphor. I’m sure everyone in their hearts knows that the only reason this tightrope walk was unearthed was in order to be able to do something apolitical involving the Twin Towers, and maybe do some sly nods and winks towards the lack of security allowing various characters with specific agendas to target them for promotional reasons?

Is that issue inherent within the World Trade Center addressed at all in the film? That, like Everest (though man-made, which kind of makes it worse), it is going to attract thrill seekers and crazy people simply because ‘it is there’?

But, doesn’t that just leave empty spectacle with a veneer of respectability (and faux-triumph?), and a slightly queasy feeling that there is a bigger story of innocent people facing the same horrific drop from the building that is going unaddressed? At least Everest is acknowledging that people died up there.

[mfunk9786]

My defense of Petit's actions would just be that he sees a poetry in doing this thing at any height, and so much like many pursuits, taking it higher and higher to what was its logical endpoint made sense to him in a way that didn't seem to be as much in a daredevil spirit as in a "I wonder if we can set this up mechanically and get away with it" type of spirit, or at least that's what the documentary and this film have led me to believe.

That being said, even knowing how it turns out, what lends drama to the staging of The Walk is the feeling of being at that height, of seeing how carelessly Petit leaps over the railing of the building to do something to the rigging of the wire or change into his costume, of seeing the buckling and hearing the tactile shifting of the wire as he performs this feat. At no time do we think this went badly because Petit is narrating the film in past tense, and because many will already know how this goes - but the result is beside the point, because the film does a very good job of putting the viewer up on that roof and making them feel a part of the plot ("coup") to make this happen.

I think this is absolutely a case of the towers attracting a crazy person simply because 'it is there,' but as hard as it tries at times to add this layer, I don't think this movie is about New York or about those towers, or the context of what happened to them later, because that's irrelevant to what's taking place when Petit walks the wire. As mentioned as a joke-y line in passing, these could just be two incredibly tall trees - Petit just wants to dazzle the largest audience possible, for ego, for a desire to perform and accomplish something exceptional, as some sort of a wish fulfillment - but the movie does a great job of carrying his spirit with it, where a lesser one might frame the whole enterprise as more of an Evel Knievel thing, done merely to tangle with and defy death. Doesn't seem like death was on Petit's mind whatsoever, or he wouldn't have been able to do this in the first place. You're absolutely right that it would be a much lesser film if it were constructed around a false "can he do this and survive" type of carnival barker approach, but to its credit - it isn't at all.