If the IMAX 3D spectacle of Everest doesn’t cut it for you, perhaps another real-life tale of human adventure getting the massive-screen adaptation will do the trick. While James Marsh delivered the best documentary imaginable on the subject with Man on Wire, Robert Zemeckis is now set to provide a narrative take on the events with The Walk. Based on Philippe Petit’s book To Reach the Clouds, it follows Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the man who performed the illegal wire walk between the World Trade Center towers.
The first full-length trailer has now arrived today, which dives more into Petit’s process of actually pulling off such a stunt, as well as the crew that helped him do so. Judging from this footage, unless one succumbs to vertigo, we imagine Zemeckis’ high-flying spectacle can’t be missed this fall.
“The Walk is surprising in so many ways,” says New York Film Festival Director Kent Jones, revealing it’ll open the festival this year. “First of all, it plays like a classic heist movie in the tradition of The Asphalt Jungle or Bob le flambeur — the planning, the rehearsing, the execution, the last-minute problems — but here it’s not money that’s stolen but access to the world’s tallest buildings. It’s also an astonishing recreation of Lower Manhattan in the ’70s. And then, it becomes something quite rare, rich, mysterious… and throughout it all, you’re on the edge of your seat.”
Also starring James Badge Dale, Ben Schwartz, Charlotte Le Bon, Clément Sibony and César Domboy, check out the first full-length trailer below.
Twelve people have walked on the moon, but only one man – Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) – has ever, or will ever, walk in the immense void between the World Trade Center towers. Guided by his real-life mentor, Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley), and aided by an unlikely band of international recruits, Petit and his gang overcome long odds, betrayals, dissension and countless close calls to conceive and execute their mad plan. Robert Zemeckis, the director of such marvels as Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Back to the Future, Polar Express and Flight, again uses cutting edge technology in the service of an emotional, character-driven story. With innovative photorealistic techniques and IMAX 3D wizardry, The Walk is true big-screen cinema, a chance for moviegoers to viscerally experience the feeling of reaching the clouds. The film, a PG-rated, all-audience entertainment for moviegoers 8 to 80, unlike anything audiences have seen before, is a love letter to Paris and New York City in the 1970s, but most of all, to the Towers of the World Trade Center.
The Walk opens on October 2nd, 2015.