I fully admit that when the first teaser for this movie hit theaters back in JANUARY (god we have been advertising this movie for a LONG ASS TIME), I wasn’t gonna see it. We had Man on Wire, I thought. We don’t need this movie. Then I actually watched Man on Wire (thinking I should at least ride my high horse, not just talk about it) and was suddenly really interested in seeing The Walk.

I know. I’m difficult.

This is the story of Philippe Petit, the high wire artist that (illegally) strung a high wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974, and walked between them. The movie covers how he got into high wire stuff, and how he planned and managed to pull off “Le Coup.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Petit, with Charlotte Le Bon as Annie, his girlfriend and chief conspirator (we saw her around these parts in The Hundred Foot Journey). Ben Kingsley plays Petit’s teacher and mentor in the art of high wire performing. This is a decidedly Robert Zemeckis movie- feel good and kinda schmaltzy. It’s framed around JGL as Petit giving a voice over and sitting on the torch of the Statue of Liberty (with the WTC in the background) explaining everything.

That’s the real weakness of this movie: with Petit giving the voice over, it’s basically the same thing as Man on Wire with better re-enactments. I mean, the better re-enactment, and the fact that there isn’t any video of Petit’s actual walk is why I ended up wanting to see this movie at all, but… I would have liked it to be less like a version of Man on Wire and more it’s own thing.

JGL is really quite good- I’ve heard some complaints that his French accent is too cartoony, but come on- have you heard Petit speak? The man sounds like a baguette looks. But there’s a balance between the ego that demands he do this thing, the charisma that is required to get people in on this crazy-ass plan, and the doubt that he couldn’t let anyone see. His French sounded passable, but they also did a lot of “Let’s speak English because we have to practice for when we go to America to do this thing.”

Annie is an interesting character in all of this, because her role in real life was girlfriend and emotional support to this egotistical, temperamental, obsessive artiste. Zemeckis cut out the part where, after he was released from police custody, there was a woman waiting who wanted to be the first to bang the dude that walked between the Twin Towers. Petit went with her instead of returning to his friends and Annie and described it as the greatest pleasure he’s ever known, which is a) the most French thing I’ve heard of, and b) pretty telling of his character, I think. They broke up right after Le Coup, with Annie telling him that it was time to chase her own dream.

The thing this movie is banking on is the visuals. Which, if you are uneasy with heights, or get vertigo, this is not the movie to see in IMAX 3D. It was shot to be seen in 3D, and it works, wonderfully, but damn. I was certain that my butt was parked in a movie theater, and there were still a few points where I had to look away. (I’m okay with heights as long as I know I’m safe and I know how I’m safely getting down. So observation decks, sure. Cliffs I can stand back from? Fine. The outsides of buildings without a safety harness? Fuck that.) It’s absolutely worth seeing in IMAX, if you don’t get vertigo.

Also, I knew how it ended.

If I didn’t know all of that, the tension would have been really unbearable. The trick with a story like this- where the ending is known- is in the performances of the people who are in the middle of it. They don’t know yet if things are going to work out or if the rigging is going to fail. They don’t know if NYPD is gonna do something stupid that results in a horrific accident. They have to be in the moment to make the stakes worth it. I will say this for Zemeckis: he gets that performance out of his actors.

The effects are really stunning, and the real thing I wanted to see was the engineering of the wire. I had so many questions that Man on Wire just only sort of answered. Zemeckis gave me just enough of how things worked that I feel content with the amount of information I now have. Not like, I now have enough to pull a similar coup off, should I want to (I don’t. My balance isn’t that good), but I have enough to have a basic understanding of how it worked.

The thing I’m sort of dancing around is the fact that the final character in this movie is the Twin Towers. They stand over everything, and it’s their very existence that makes the plot happen at all, and one of the reasons I said “no” at seeing this at first was I didn’t want to endure two hours of mourning for the towers. Mostly, it isn’t mourning. It’s a portrait of this landmark that’s so ingrained in the landscape of New York (and the absence of which is ingrained in the very concept of America now), kind of a love letter, a little bit of a memorial, and a lot of, “Look at what this was, as it was meant to be, the way it was before.”

Maybe it’s too soon, maybe it’s the right time- there’s a whole generation that has no memory of the Twin Towers as they were. I don’t know. The very last lines and the last shot are heavy handed, but expecting Zemeckis to resist over-stating his point, just to make sure you got it, is unrealistic.

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(The visuals of the trailer will give you an idea of whether you can stomach the movie visually.)

The Walk is in IMAX 3D now, and opened in all formats on Friday, October 9th. You can find tickets (US) at Fandango and Moviefone.