Today's adrenaline jolt comes courtesy of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 'The Walk'

 By 
Josh Dickey
 on 
Today's adrenaline jolt comes courtesy of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 'The Walk'
Joseph Gordon-Levitt does the unthinkable in the first trailer for "The Walk." Credit: YouTube

Don't try this at home. If you're afraid of heights, maybe don't even watch this at home.

In the first teaser trailer for The Walk, which is essentially a live-action version of the Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Philippe Petit, the French high-wire artist who traversed the World Trade Center towers in 1974. And he does the unthinkable.

Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Flight) directed The Walk for Sony -- a bit of a puzzling choice, since Man on Wire, which won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2009, already plays very much like a taut heist-thriller and contains re-enactment elements.

But this one has JGL and is in 3D, so it has that going for it.

Also going for it: A vertiginous blend of camera-work and CG effects, which recreate the World Trade Center towers in eerily intimate fashion and give us a pretty good sense of what it would be like to lean out over a steel beam 1,300 feet above lower Manhattan. If you're into that kind of thing.

The Walk is set for release Oct. 2 of next year.

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