Robert Zemeckis’s brings his technical brilliance to this vertigo-inducing tale of tall-wire artist Philippe PetitJames Marsh’s brilliantly dramatic 2008 documentary Man on Wire told us much about Philippe Petit,the Frenchman who famously performed an illegal tall-wire act between the twin towers of original York’s newly built World Trade middle in 1974. From the retrospectively sinister overtones of planning of “le coup (the “artistic crime of the century”) to Petit’s euphoric post-walk infidelity (he discovered “what it meant to be famous”, recalls former girlfriend, and Annie Allix),Marsh’s film provided both a celebration and analysis of this supremely life-affirming stunt. All it lacked was moving footage of the walk itself, which is preserved only in still photographs and in the vivid memories of those who saw it with their own eyes. Robert Zemeckis’s lively drama fills that gap with a show-stopping sequence that puts the viewer proper there on the wire as Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) steps out into “the void”.
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Source: theguardian.com