If those Parisians ran away from a flickering black and white image soundtracked only by the clack-clack-clack of the projector, they didn’t do it for self-preservation; they did it as willing players in a thrilling game. The train wasn’t real. They knew the train wasn’t real. And yet, perhaps, they ran. Ask Zemeckis what distinguishes his film, which has been a decade in the pipeline, from Man On Wire, James Marsh’s celebrated 2008 documentary on the same subject, and he’ll say it’s a matter of perspective. The documentary tells the story of Petit’s feat. The Walk lets you live it. That’s no empty boast. The film’s wire walk, viewed in 3D on an IMAX screen, puts you right up there on a ¾ inch diameter cable over a thousand feet in the air. It’s every bit as astonishing and unnerving as that sounds. The audience I saw it with may not have run out in panic, but judging by the audible gasps around the screening, the effect of Zemeckis’ wizardry was being keenly felt. This is fairground attraction film-making, expertly created to transport us somewhere unimaginable and loan us its thrills. It’s a heightened, almost cartoonish tale of what the French might call poetic ambition, the Americans might call dogged determination, and the English: cockiness. It’s told in flashback and narrated with a with a wink and a smile by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a Parisian accent, turtleneck and high-waisted trousers. Gordon-Levitt bubbles with vim as Petit, creating a more likeable character than the documentary documented. (The matter of Petit abandoning his friends and girlfriend for casual sex with a high-wire groupie immediately after pulling off “le coup” is—not at all curiously—left out.) Gordon-Levitt’s Petit is funny rather than off-putting in his egotism, a raconteur with a romantic dream. Another couple of bizarre moments break the flow of the film’s genuinely astounding climax, one symbolic, the other mysterious. It’s as if the movie gets swept up in the romanticism of Petit’s unlikely dream at these times, resulting in one particularly ponderous incursion by a seagull. None of that though, nor the caricatures, nor the contrived explanation for why everyone is speaking English all the time, nor the interruptions of Joseph Gordon-Kaye-Levitt, get in the way of the film’s dizzying achievement, which is a conjuring trick of the highest order. Simply put, it lets you walk in the sky. Where else can you do that and come out smiling? Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.