Pun Salad

A coincidence of Netflix queue dynamics provided this movie near the 15th anniversary of 9/11.

It is a fictionalized version of a movie we've actually seen before: Man on Wire, the 2008 documentary that described Philippe Petit's audacious and illegal tightrope walk between the WTC towers back in August 1974. That documentary won an Oscar; this movie won zero Oscars, and was kind of a box office dud, and we know how things turn out, but I still found it enjoyable.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Petit, which demands that he adopt a silly French accent. OK, that decision that was probably demanded by reality, but still. A Paris street performer, he takes it into his head to conquer the towers, and he gradually acquires a motley (but colorful) array of co-conspirators whose dedication to Petit's dream varies. But there's only so much dramatic tension you can muster when (again) we know how things are going to turn out. (The movie also sent me to a reality-vs-film site to see how well it followed reality. Pretty well.)

The filmmakers do a stunning CGI job of recreating the 1974-era WTC. It kind of made me wish that I'd seen it in theatre-3D when it came out in 2015; if I had managed to avoid vertigo-related barfing, it would have certainly been awesome.