The Walk (2015)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
The story of French high-wire artist Philippe Petit's attempt to cross the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.
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What critics compared The Walk to
There are bits of poetry and flickering wit that grace Petit’s passage into an ebullient boor and bore: a 1970s France that could have come from a side street of Jeunet’s “Amélie”; a boy’s bare feet walking the rope effortlessly elided by those of the grown man; the girlfriend’s introduction singing a mixed French-English version of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” as he plies his buskery on a Paris street (“For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind…”).
Hoky and lovin’ it, Robert Zemeckis’s goofy film about Philippe Petit and his historic wire-walk begins with a Francophilic backstory to the man that makes Amelie look like Neorealism.
The film’s insistence on half-baked Amélie-brand whimsy ensures we never get anything like decent characterisation or narrative.
Full of Gallic shrugs and merry montages, the early scenes have him as a whimsical clown working the streets of a Paris that looks as if it's been plucked straight out of Amelie .
For instance, the introduction of protagonist Petit whooshing through a sugary, Amélie version of Paris on his unicycle; the film’s whitewashing of Petit’s character, so that it feels nearer to the children’s book based on his exploits than to James Marsh’s 2008 documentary Man on Wire; the introduction of stoner comic relief characters so arbitrarily sketched that they might as well be placeholders reading “Comic Relief TK”; a tonally miscalculated encounter with an ominous red-eyed seagull; and the fact that Petit is played by the smug, dreadful Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who narrates the movie from a perch on Lady Liberty’s torch, speaking in a French accent achieved, I assume, through drinking a quart of heavy cream between takes.
Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity , released in the US exactly two years ago, proved that popular cinema could be adult in its themes as well as thrilling in its execution.
These scenes are just as amazing as when Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are floating around in space during Gravity, or when Batman looks down upon the city from a perch on top of a skyscraper in The Dark Knight.
Although amply justified by its thrilling twenty-minute set piece, The Walk (unlike Gravity , Alfonso Cuarón’s marvelous 2013 exploration of the 3-D void) is not a fully sustained experience.
The Walk does not consistently push the boundaries of 3D craftsmanship like Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity , but it does reach similar artistic peaks with the eponymous sequence – enough to make Zemeckis’ film must-see material in both 3D and IMAX, on its own.
Sin duda, The Walk es una de las cintas más espectaculares filmadas en 3D y IMAX (inútil verla en cualquier otro formato), casi tan genial como aquellos míticos primeros doce minutos de Gravity (Cuarón, 2013), pero resulta mediocre en la construcción de personajes, la introducción de subtextos y en la necesaria reflexión sobre el arte.
Avatar may have revolutionised the 3D cinema to the next level and sure, we have some good ones like Gravity (2013) and The Walk (2015).
The result can be dizzying, and not in a thrilling way (as opposed to what Robert Zemeckis pulled off in his 2015 The Walk – hardly a great film, but one where the technology worked to benefit the experience).