SPOILER ALERT
If you haven’t seen this movie and you want to, you probably shouldn’t be reading this post. I’m going to tell you how it ends. Right now. Go away if you don’t want to know! Last chance! Okay then, you asked for it.
All day, part of my mind has been working on why I was so angry that Remember Me invoked 9/11 at the end of the movie as a plot device to kill Robert Pattinson’s character (Tyler Harkin). I tweeted my ire. I left an angry comment in the discussion thread at Twitarded. I was fucking hopped up about it. And my feeling was, yes, if Remember Me was a person with testicles instead of a poorly constructed drama featuring some of the finest eye candy this side of Hollywood, I would punch it in the balls.
Here’s why.
If you’re going to feature the tragedy at the World Trade Center on 9/11 in your movie, please don’t tack it on in the last five minutes and treat it superficially. If you do, I’m going to nut punch you because those people who died there, those people who loved them, and those people who survived it? They deserve better. I just feel that the magnitude of that catastrophe must be respected in all representations. And it wasn’t here.
Tyler’s story line ends just before he realizes he’s going to die in the World Trade Center. You see him staring out the window, you know the date, you understand what’s about to happen to him. But he doesn’t know it yet. And that’s the last we see of him. The point of view then conveniently shifts to the other characters’ reactions to the planes hitting and their loss of Tyler. And then it all nicely ends with their subsequent recovery and the positive transformation of their lives, ostensibly because of 9/11 and the lessons they learned. All this in maybe five minutes of film.
Let me ask this. If Tyler is the main protagonist and Remember me is his story, why stop telling it right at its most painful, terrifying point? Tyler didn’t die in that final scene of him standing in the window. We know he’s going to live several more excruciating, horrifying moments, or even longer, right? So why doesn’t the movie stay with him for those last horrific moments? Why are we, the viewers, spared that nightmare? Don’t you wish you could see what those terrifying final moments were like for Tyler?
Of course you fucking don’t. Nobody in their right mind does.
So then, if we can’t deal with the most painful aspects of 9/11, why are we dealing with it here at all? If you want to go there, then fucking go there and do it justice. But if the very real experiences of the human beings who died in that nightmare are too painful for this movie, just don’t fucking go there. I promise you, you can tell a compelling “love your family” and “live for the moment” story without using that terrible tragic day to do it.
Let me clarify something important here. If Remember Me included more graphic, poignant Tyler death scenes, I would have probably hurt someone. Thank God they didn’t do that in the movie.
What I’m trying to say is this. If you want to make a movie about 9/11, then deal with the real 9/11. The one where people died in unimaginably terrifying ways, the one where families, children, husbands and wives waited and waited and waited and tried not to imagine that their loved ones suffered such an unthinkable end. The one where those who survived had their lives destroyed and fought every day with all they had just to fucking go on in spite of it. Those people are heroes, and their stories are well worth telling.
By tacking 9/11 on as the surprise ending to this film, Remember Me failed miserably at conveying the magnitude of that day. It showed some sad characters getting their lives together, like 9/11 helped them resolve their little neuroses and get their priorities straight and fucking hell folks, it just didn’t work like that for most people. People went on, yes. But it was a heart breaking struggle. It was painful. None of that comes through the ending here. And plenty of people had their lives destroyed forever because of it.
I guess what I’m saying is that there are so many real, compelling stories of 9/11 that should be told. But 9/11 was the defining moment in those narratives, not the convenient plot twist.
This is just how I feel. If you felt differently about the movie, I respect that. I’m honestly glad that some people were moved by it. It’s just not how I felt, or how I was affected and I don’t believe for a moment there’s one right opinion on this. There’s just all of us, you know? All of us out here buying movie tickets and having an experience and sharing it on the internet.
I will say this. Remember Me affected me enough to *PTMFS. And that’s not nothing.
*Post This Mother Fucking Shit, a term coined by Snarkier Than You and Jenny Jerkface over at Twitarded.
