'Remember Me' Remains the Strangest and Most Inappropriate 9/11 Movie Ever

As I write this essay, it is September 11th, 2020, 19 years removed from one of the most monumental tragedies in American history. As I ponder 9/11 and reflect on my memories now filtered through nearly two full decades of pop culture criticism, I find myself struck by one strange memory that has nagged at me for over a decade. Hollywood and September 11th as seen through the perspective of the 2010 teen romance Remember Me.

Why Remember Me? Why indeed, dear reader? Honestly, I think I am still not over this abomination of a 9/11 movie that is also not a 9/11 movie. Somehow as a culture we allowed Remember Me a pass and the ability to crassly and commercially use September 11th as a way of giving weight to an otherwise weightless and forgettable teen romance. One day, perhaps not today, but in the future, Remember Me will take its rightful place in the Hollywood Hall of Shame and in this essay, let it be known, I was the one who nominated it first.

As I walked out of the March 12th, 2010 screening of Robert Pattinson's romance Remember Me, I did something I never do, I turned to two fellow film-goers, complete strangers, and asked them if they found the ending offensive. Both women I spoke to replied tersely 'why would we?' As they walked on, confused and annoyed by my question, I continued to puzzle myself. In only nine years after the tragedy, how had we become so astonishingly blase? How did anyone feel so comfortable with September 11th that they made it a plot point in a teen-centric romance less than a decade later?

For those who’ve rightfully forgotten, Remember Me is a romance aimed at teens about a brooding intellectual/trouble-maker named Tyler. played by Robert Pattinson, who attempts to take revenge on a brutal police officer (Chris Cooper) by dating and dumping the cop’s daughter, Allie (Emilie De Ravin). As you would expect the date and dump strategy falls apart when Pattinson's Tyler falls for the Allie and thus begins a collision course from romance to devastation as she is soon to find out about his real motivation for meeting her.

Playing behind both characters are deeply emotional back stories. For Tyler, his brother Michael committed suicide several years earlier and left Tyler in an ocean of resentment, anger and regret. Tyler blames his emotionally distant father (Pierce Brosnan) for his brother's suicide. As for Allie, the film opens with 11 year old Allie losing her mother in a late night shooting in a New York City subway station.

The twin tragedies, see what did there, TWIN tragedies, bond the two lovers and all looks bright after they reconcile from his betrayal. Then, on ..September 11th 2001.. Tyler attends his father's office. By this point in the third act of Remember Me, father and son have reconciled, ever so tenuously, after an incident at school involving Tyler's little sister Caroline (Ruby Jerins). As Tyler gazes out of the window of his father's high rise office he has a brand new smile on his face and a newly hopeful outlook on life.

That morning, Tyler had told Allie that he loved her and he was waiting for his dad so that the two could talk about the future. As Tyler gazes out on the streets of New York City the camera pulls back revealing that Tyler’s Dad’s office is in a familiar spot. It continues to pull back until a second large building comes into view behind it. Earlier, in a scene that bookended the film, a chalkboard at Caroline’s school told us the date but not the year. In this third act reveal however, we finally see the full date, the camera pulls back again and the movie fades to black.

Director Allen Coulter takes the screen dark and shows good taste and restraint in not showing the planes. A moment of black screen and silence soon welcomes the film's mournful score. Thrust back into the light, we watch the immediate aftermath of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. We watch as Tyler's mother (Lena Olin) walks out of her apartment and joins a crowd running toward the Towers for a closer look.

Tyler's father is shown standing outside his town car in traffic near the trade center, he had taken Caroline to school that morning and was arriving late. We cut to the rooftop of Tyler's apartment building well in sight of the horrific scene and where Tyler's roommate Aiden (Tate Ellington) and Allie watch with horror as windblown debris slowly rains down around them, they appear unaware that Tyler was at the Trade Tower that day.

One final shot shows Tyler’s beloved journal where he’d written letters to his late brother now laying on the ground, covered in dust and burnt by flames. Oh how effective all of this could have been in a more mature movie. However, this is a fully compromised teen-centric romance. Remember Me is a movie that was rendered safe enough to carry a PG-13 rating in 2010 with zero trigger warnings to let audiences know that this Robert Pattinson teen romance they were about to watch featured a horrific depiction of our nation’s greatest tragedy.

The PG-13 rating, the ad campaign for Remember Me, created to lure Twilight fans into the theater to swoon over Robert Pattinson, features a soundtrack with the radio-ready pop song called Kandles by National Skyline and could not possibly feel more crass and commercial as it would with any other teen-centered romance. No one in the marketing department behind Remember Me batted an eyelash about marketing a movie like this that happens to end on the September 11th terror attacks.

Numbness was one excuse I finally did hear from a friend who talked with me about Remember Me at the time. My friend felt that we’d just gone numb from the tragedy that took us into two wars and led to some of the darkest moments of American politics, a time filled with lies, deceit and mistrust. By a mere nine years later after the tragedy of September 11th, we’d become so hardened to the tragedy that Remember Me could use 9/11 as a plot point and there was no outcry, no protest, barely a gasp.

As of this writing, we are now 19 years removed from September 11th and Remember Me has become, for me, one of the strangest emblems of our young, filmgoing century. I have the distinct feeling that future generations will see Remember Me and realize just how truly awful and horrifying it is that a movie this weightless and cheap, this crass and commercialized, would have the nerve to include September 11th.

The unmitigated gall of the filmmakers to use 9/11 in this movie blows my mind even a decade later. I imagine it will take several more years and perhaps a few good YouTube video essays before Remember Me takes on a deserved reputation as a reviled and revolting point in American film history. I’m being a tad hyperbolic, but truly, I still haven’t gotten over this movie. Even a decade later, my thoughts on September 11th remain poisoned by the memory of Remember Me and Hollywood’s shameless willingness to exploit September 11th less than a decade removed.

Numbness or not, regardless of our strained justifications, someday down the road, Remember Me belongs on a list of our most shameful and shameless films in history. Hollywood has yet to find a way to portray September 11th in a meaningful and memorable way. Several films have come and gone with mentions of 9/11 but most are respectful not to portray that day. Remember Me is rare in that space and could not possibly be anymore unworthy of that portrayal.