这篇文章不应该算影评，而是作者看完电影后的感想，相比有那些很不喜欢结局的人，这个人却从结尾里得到了另外一番感想。

From the ads on TV, Remem­ber Me looks like your every­day col­lege dram­edy. (Spoiler alert: Sur­prise plot points dis­cussed ahead!) It stars Robert Pat­tin­son mak­ing goo-goo eyes at his col­lege girl­friend (Emi­lie de Ravin). The film’s poster shows the sweet­hearts clutched in a pas­sion­ate embrace with the cryp­tic tagline: “Live in the moments.”


What it doesn’t tell you: the moments this movie is liv­ing in is the sum­mer of 2001, and Sep­tem­ber 11 fig­ures promi­nently in the final scenes. The end is so con­tro­ver­sial, a num­ber of blogs—from New York Mag­a­zineto Gawker to even Perez Hilton—gave every detail of it away. This isn’t a story for the faint of heart. A junior-high-school-aged girl at my screen­ing left the room weep­ing. Adults had tears in their eyes. The movie is poised to be one of the biggest tear-jerkers to come out of Hol­ly­wood since Titanic.
The ques­tion: does Remem­ber Me earn its tears, or exploit Sep­tem­ber 11 for a cheap cry? If you haven’t read about the film online, you’ll prob­a­bly go to the movie (with a tween or two in tow) expect­ing a sweet romance. And that you’ll get, for most of the film. There’s the pre­req­ui­site cheesy first-date dia­logue at an Indian restau­rant, and the scene where de Ravin gets so drunk at a col­lege frat party, Pat­tin­son holds her head back while she throws up. None of this pre­pares you for what ulti­mately hap­pens, though a vio­lent act in the first scene serves as eerie fore­shad­ow­ing. When the Twin Tow­ers are hit—we never see an air­plane crash, just the debris—it’s a com­plete shock that will leave you sad and stunned for days.


But if you think about it, wasn’t that the way we all felt after Sep­tem­ber 11? The attack was com­pletely unex­pected, just like the con­clu­sion of this movie. Other films about Sep­tem­ber 11 (World Trade Cen­ter, United 93) have pre­sented their grim sub­ject mat­ter from the very start, in every TV ad and the­atri­cal trailer. Remem­ber Me is tar­geted to a dif­fer­ent demo­graphic: teenage girls, many of whom were very young in 2001. For them, Sep­tem­ber 11 is prob­a­bly a dis­tant mem­ory or maybe even just a les­son in a his­tory book, espe­cially for kids who didn’t live in New York or Wash­ing­ton. Given that mea­sure, this movie accu­rately depicts the hor­ror, dan­ger, grief, rage, mean­ing­less­ness, and bru­tal­ity of that day. It actu­ally hon­ors his­tory, albeit in a strange and unset­tling way.
Until now, most of the art to come out of Sep­tem­ber 11 has been tar­geted to adults. A lot of it has tried to give us “clo­sure,” to explain what hap­pened to us because of the attacks. A reoc­cur­ring theme—from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incred­i­bly Close to Don DeLillo’s Falling Man—is the dif­fi­cult road to heal­ing. If there’s a lit­er­ary equiv­a­lent to Remem­ber Me, it’s Claire Messud’s 2006 novel The Emperor’s Chil­dren, another story about how young, spoiled, 20-somethings are affected by the sud­den­ness of Sep­tem­ber 11, which ends the novel. But in that case, the intro­duc­tion of Sep­tem­ber 11 felt over the top, like an escape from res­o­lu­tion rather than a nat­ural end­ing point. It just didn’t feel real.


有人说RM的结尾就是赚噱头，利用人们曾经的伤痛赚票房。对于美国人来说，那件事可能彻底改变了他们对世界的看法，它不止是个政×治事件，更是心灵上的创伤，所以很多人非常反感那个结尾，不仅仅是因为它不完满，更是因为自己的伤疤又被揭开了。可是作为局外人，没经历过那个事件的人，收获的应该是爱与感动，结局告诉我们的，是要抓住自己的幸福，因为你不知道下一秒钟会发生什么。就像这篇文章的作者所写的，那件事在没经历过的新一代中，只是历史，而RM则让他们经历了那件事的伤痛，告诉下一代，永远记住那个伤痛。